My last memory error in C code in production was in 2018. Prior to that it I had a memory error in C code in production in 2007 or 2008.
In C++, I eventually gave up trying to ship the same level of quality and left the language altogether.
As for why your experience may be different, my hunch is that either your code was super simple OR you didn’t test it thoroughly enough against malicious/unexpected inputs OR you never connected the code to untrusted I/O.
Keep in mind the data for this comes from popular projects that have enough attention to warrant active exploit research by a wide population. This is different from a project you wrote that doesn’t have the same level of attention.
You are misremembering the various reports - the reports were not that 80%[1] of issues were due to memory errors, but more along the lines of 80% of exploits were due to memory errors.
You could have 1000 bugs, with 10 of them being vulnerabilities, and 8 of those 10 being due to memory errors, and that would still be in line with the reports.
> As for why your experience may be different, my hunch is that either your code was super simple OR you didn’t test it thoroughly enough against malicious/unexpected inputs OR you never connected the code to untrusted I/O.
Payments processing, telecoms and munitions control software.
Of those, your explanation only applies to Telecoms; payments processing (EMV) was basically a constant stream of daily attacks, while munitions are live, in the field, with real explosives. We would've noticed any bugs, not just memory error bugs with the munitions one.
--------------------
[1] The number wasn't 80% IIRC, more like 70%?
For EMV you had C connected directly to the network under a steady stream of attacks and only had an issue once? I find that hard to believe. What’s more likely is a Java websever frontend talking to some C processing / crypto code in which case again you’re less likely to encounter bugs in your code because it’s difficult to find a path to injecting unsanitized input.
For munitions there’s not generally I/O with uncontrolled input so it’s less likely you’d find cases where you didn’t properly sanitize inputs and relied on an untrusted length to access a buffer. As a famous quote states, it’s ok if your code has an uptime of 3 minutes until the first bug if the bomb explodes in 2
For operating systems kernels, browsers etc, vulnerabilities have a much, much bigger impact than logic errors: vulnerabilities need to be fixed immediately, and released immediately. Most logic errors don't need to be fixed immediately (sure, it depends on the issue, and on the type of software.)
I would probably say "for memory unsafe languages, 80% of the _impact_ is due to memory vulnerabilities"
