National Cyber Director Harry Coker recently talked about the efforts of his office to implement the National Cybersecurity Strategy, including its call for private sector and government coders to ensure that secure-by-design initiatives integrate memory-safe programming languages.
At a summit held Wednesday in Washington, D.C., he said that the White House Office of the National Cyber Director will release a paper in the coming weeks that addresses software measureability and memory safety.
“Some of the most dangerous vulnerabilities that criminals look to exploit are memory safety bugs, and memory-safe coding languages prevent these errors from ever making it into production. And yet – developers have been slow to adopt them, even though many have existed for years,” Coker said.
He noted that ONCD is developing guidance aimed at helping agencies “eliminate unnecessary degree requirements for contracted cybersecurity positions.”
Other ONCD initiatives Coker discussed at the event are implementing improvements to the Border Gateway Protocol, building a diverse national cyber workforce and working with legal and academic experts to look at liability regimes as part of efforts to hold software developers accountable for bringing to market insecure code.
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