In February 2024, the White House Office of the National Cyber Director published a critically-acclaimed technical report, titled “Back to the Building Blocks: A Path Toward Secure and Measurable Software.” The report builds upon the President’s National Cybersecurity Strategy in describing the urgent need to address undiscovered vulnerabilities that malicious actors can exploit. The report argues that we must reduce the attack surface in cyberspace that our adversaries can exploit by preventing entire classes of vulnerabilities from entering the digital ecosystem. The White House has prioritized eliminating memory safety vulnerabilities and offers a three-pronged approach – memory safe programming languages, memory safe chip architecture, and formal methods – as an effective way to secure systems by design.

Anjana Rajan is a cryptographer, technology executive, and entrepreneur who works at the nexus of human rights and national security. She currently is the Assistant National Cyber Director for Technology Security at The White House. In this political appointment at the Office of the National Cyber Director, Anjana leads efforts to apply the President’s National Cybersecurity Strategy to real world issues, such as open-source software, generative AI, and space.