Google sees 68% drop in Android memory safety flaws over 5 years

MrAlex94 · on Nov 11, 2024

Surely the scudo[1] memory allocator, which was implemented in Android 11 has helped here as well?

[1] https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2020/06/system-har...

tgeery · on Nov 11, 2024

this article is a bit tough... feels like a marketing piece for some Google report.

did I read that wrong or was this whole analysis based on percentages... like what does 76% -> 24% drop in memory related bugs mean in terms of nominal bugs or nominal bugs / kloc

also, it mostly credited memory safe languages but then also just threw this out from the Google report

> Based on what we've learned, it's become clear that we do not need to throw away or rewrite all our existing memory-unsafe code

tl;dr android may be producing less memory-related vulnerabilities and it's not exactly clear how