Masters Thesis of Craig E. Ward

The title of the paper is Implications of Programming Language Selection On the Construction of Secure Software Systems. The abstract is below.

The work was performed for the LMU Graduate Seminar class for the Fall 2004 term. My advisor was Ray Toal.

I extracted part of the material to create a presentation for the Unix Users Association of Southern California, Orange County Chapter. The slides for the presentation are available for download (external link). The page also has other information about secure coding.

Abstract

Selecting an implementation programming language for a software system is one of the most important decisions made during the creation of any software system. Different programming languages have different implications for the difficulty or ease of developing secure code. This paper takes eleven vulnerabilities including buffer overruns, malicious input, and race conditions known to exist in deployed systems and analyzes five different languages (C, C++, Java, Perl, and ML) to compare how each language either aids or hinders the creation of a secure software system.

Last updated Friday, December 12, 2014.