Memory Safety.

Memory safety is the property that a program never reads, writes, or executes memory it has not legitimately allocated, preventing entire classes of vulnerabilities. It belongs to the Application Security category of cybersecurity.

Memory safety is the property that a program never reads, writes, or executes memory it has not legitimately allocated, preventing entire classes of vulnerabilities.

Memory safety guarantees include spatial safety (no out-of-bounds access), temporal safety (no use-after-free or double-free), type safety, and initialization safety. Languages like C and C++ are not memory safe by default, leading to most critical CVEs and exploits via buffer overflows, UAFs and type confusion. Modern industry data — including Microsoft, Google Project Zero, and the U.S. ONCD 2024 report — attributes 60-70 percent of high-severity vulnerabilities in major C/C++ code bases to memory-safety bugs. Mitigations (ASLR, DEP, CFI, sanitizers) raise the cost of exploitation, but eliminating the bugs at the source via memory-safe languages or formally verified subsets is the only definitive solution.

Defences for Memory Safety typically combine technical controls and operational practices, as detailed in the full definition above.

Common alternative names include: Memory-safety bugs.