Reliability in Building Blocks for Secure Software

We summarize and review the February 2024 White House report “Back to the Building Blocks: A Path Toward Secure and Measurable Software.” The report argues that the technical community can greatly improve cybersecurity by using memory-safe languages (without, we note, turning off the protection), supported by formal methods and memory-protecting hardware, and sketches the roles that top executives, the so-called “C-suite,” have in securing software. We add that smaller software is an approach to secure software not mentioned in the report.