1993124 - [meta] Improve the memory safety of C++ in Firefox

Status: NEW

(Core :: Security, task)

Description

[Andrew McCreight [:mccr8]]

Memory safety issues, like use-after-frees, buffer overflows, integer overflows, and other sorts of undefined behavior, are a difficult problem for any large C++ program to address. In a program like Firefox that attempts to create a safe virtual machine that executes hostile code, memory safety issues can lead to security problems for our users, which is bad. We've had a number of ad hoc efforts to improve the memory safety of Firefox over the years. Pursuing these in a more systematic way should improve the security of the browser. Chromium and WebKit appear to have been systematically pursuing this for at least a few years, which can provide us with some guidance of the best ways to go about it.

I'm filing this as sort of a "meta meta bug", to provide a single place to gather potential approaches to improving C++ memory safety in Firefox.

Comment 1

[Andrew McCreight [:mccr8]]

Bug 504250 is sort of related, but it is more about making it harder to take advantage of the situation after memory safety has been violated already.

Comment 2

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Core::Performance: Memory' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please correct in case you think the bot is wrong.