Why Unmanaged Languages Are the Root Cause of Most Security Vulnerabilities ?

A very large percentage of significant cybersecurity vulnerabilities are caused by issues that stem from the use of unmanaged languages like C and C++. 

This is a widely recognized fact within the cybersecurity community, and major organizations like Google, Microsoft, and the US National Security Agency (NSA) have published guidance and statistics on this topic. 

Key Statistics and Reasons

• High Percentage of Vulnerabilities: Studies by Google's Chromium project and Microsoft have consistently shown that approximately 70% of all serious security bugs are memory safety problems.

• Memory Safety Issues: Unmanaged languages such as C and C++ require manual memory management. This lack of built-in memory protection mechanisms (like automatic bounds checking or garbage collection) allows developers to inadvertently introduce critical flaws, such as:

• Buffer overflows/over-reads: Writing or reading beyond the boundaries of an allocated memory buffer.
• Use-after-free errors: Accessing memory after it has been deallocated.
• Dangling pointers: Pointers that still point to a memory location that is no longer valid.
• Integer overflows: Which can lead to memory corruption.

• Exploitation: Malicious actors can often exploit these memory corruption bugs to execute arbitrary code, gain unauthorized access, or compromise systems.

• Managed Code Advantages: In contrast, managed languages like C#, Java, Python, and modern languages like Rust provide built-in memory safety guarantees through their runtime environments (garbage collection, type safety, ownership models, etc.). This significantly reduces or totally eliminates an entire class of common and severe security vulnerabilities. 


While it is still possible to write insecure code in any language (e.g., SQL injection or logic flaws), the most prevalent and dangerous class of vulnerabilities, memory corruption, is heavily associated with unmanaged languages. 

Managed languages enforce rules at compile time or runtime that prevent these specific, common, and highly dangerous memory corruption vulnerabilities from being introduced in the first place.