alt Hacker NewsThis is the real reason for the vulnpocalypse, not "technical debt".
NSA spent 20 years stockpiling vulns and pushing the industry towards half-assed solutions like address sanitization and pointer tagging when they could have put the industry on memory-safe languages instead.
They managed to get the IME/PSP/TrustZone into 99% of the CPUs out there by mandating it for government purchases; they could have done the same thing with memory-safe languages. But instead they chose to stockpile vulns. Hope they burn in hell for this.
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aa-jv • today at 12:49 PM
>IME/PSP/TrustZone into 99% of the CPUs
Yeah, about that. Its the biggest vulnerability in the industry. Nobody wants to confront this fact, though.
Too much profit to be made in subversion and human rights abuses.
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Why do you think the NSA could have put the industry on memory-safe languages?
Even if they wanted to, I highly doubt they could push the industry to do that. The industry does what it wants to do, and rewriting tons of software was far from its priorities. There were no LLMs back then to help with such a massive migration.
There's also the fact that rewriting software tends to introduce a lot of new bugs.