US White House: The responsibility of cybersecurity should be tech companies' and the Federal government's, not the individual

SoftwareSecurityUS White House: The responsibility of cybersecurity should be tech companies' and the Federal government’s, not the individualWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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Of all the things I expected to read in my morning feed of tech news, a report from the US White House stating that tech companies and governments need to stop using certain programming languages to combat cybercrime wasn’t top of my list. But that’s exactly what has happened and the document in question,Back to the Building Blocks, lays out the changes required and the reasons behind them.

Agencies such as the NSA, CISA, and FBIrecommend that the likes of C#, Python, and Rustshould be used, as these are all deemed memory-safe. Rewriting every piece of critical software is a monumental task and the report suggests that even just reworking a handful of small libraries will help. At the very least, allnewapplications should be developed using a memory-safe language.

And it’s not just about software, as choosing the right hardware matters a lot, too. Pick any one of the latest processors from AMD, Intel, Nvidia, or Qualcomm and you’ll see that they’re packed with all kinds of features to improve their memory security. One such example is thememory tagging extensionthat checks to see if the correct memory locations are being addressed in the code. There’s a performance impact to using it, of course, but this is true of all such measures.

The report goes on to state that developers should rely on so-calledformal methods, which are mathematical techniques for designing, writing, and testing code, acting as a reliable means to ensure that applications are as robust as possible.

I noticed there was one area not covered in the report, though, and that’sthe use of generative AI to create codejust from a few input words. Such models have been trained on code examples already in the wild, so to speak, and if a lot of that is memory-unsafe or contains several vulnerabilities, then there’s a good chance that the AI code will do too.

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How memory tagging works in Arm processors.(Image credit: Arm)

A diagram showing the basic premise of how memory tagging works in Arm processors

This is especially problematic for open-source software. While variousquality metricscan be monitored, a business can easily set up a system to ensure that this happens regularly and allocate dedicated staff to the role; open-source projects are heavily reliant on volunteers doing the same.

The report doesn’t provide any solution to this and simply states the research community shouldn’t ignore the issue, though I hasten to add that the problem is so complex that no single report could ever hope to address it.

Thinking of upgrading?(Image credit: Microsoft)Windows 11 review: What we think of the latest OS.How to install Windows 11: Our guide to a secure install.Windows 11 TPM requirement: Strict OS security.

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(Image credit: Microsoft)Windows 11 review: What we think of the latest OS.How to install Windows 11: Our guide to a secure install.Windows 11 TPM requirement: Strict OS security.

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Windows 11 review: What we think of the latest OS.How to install Windows 11: Our guide to a secure install.Windows 11 TPM requirement: Strict OS security.

There are a couple of other aspects the Back to the Building Blocks report covers but it ends with an interesting observation: “Software manufacturers are not sufficiently incentivized to devote appropriate resources to secure development practices, and their customers do not demand higher quality software because they do not know how to measure it.”

The recommended solution to the first part of that statement is that “cybersecurity quality must also be seen as a business imperative for which the CEO and the board of directors are ultimately accountable.” In other words, making software cyber-secure is the responsibility of large companies, not the individual user of said software.

Easier said than done, of course, and that’s probably true of everything covered in the White House’s report.

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