C++ Memory Safety and Integrity Evaluation

Abstract

C++ remains a dominant language for performance-critical systems, yet its reliance on manual memory management from the developer introduces significant safety risks. Memory leaks and dangling pointers can result in a constant increase in memory usage, eventually making a system crash. Such leaks and errors can also allow malicious individuals to access the internal RAM of the system and change any data as they choose, making such errors extremely dangerous and a security liability. This paper will evaluate the memory safety and integrity/stability of C++, focusing on the latter mentioned common vulnerabilities. Through a custom benchmarking suite, the study assesses the trade-offs between performance and safety while using several features and programming techniques. This analysis highlights the effectiveness and limitations of current mitigation techniques, offering insights into the feasibility of securing C++ applications without compromising their runtime or memory usage, along with a comparison with a standard managed language, Java.