OpenSSF Launches “Memory Safety Continuum” to Guide Incremental Security Improvements

The Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) has released The Memory Safety Continuum, a practical framework that helps developers, organizations, and security teams assess and improve their memory safety posture. Unveiled on April 28, 2025, the document positions memory safety not as a binary goal but as an evolving journey—enabling teams to advance their practices in phases through language adoption, mitigation, and testing.

The Continuum guides readers through four core states:

1. Awareness – Understanding risk and building a memory safety roadmap.
2. Mitigation – Applying defenses like sanitizers, static analysis, and memory-safe wrappers.
3. Transition – Using memory-safe languages (e.g., Rust, Go, Java, C#) for new components.
4. Completion – Standardizing memory-safe code and tooling across entire systems.

Experts from across the software ecosystem—including contributors in C++, .NET, Rust, and Python—crafted the guide, offering real-world advice tailored to mixed-codebases. OpenSSF emphasizes that this spectrum-based model helps teams align their current capabilities with achievable next steps, rather than mandating wholesale rewrites.

With memory errors still accounting for roughly 70% of software vulnerabilities (per Microsoft and Google), this Continuum aligns closely with NSA and CISA's national memory safety initiatives (see our earlier coverage). It equips practitioners with checklists, best practices, and adoption milestones—making memory safety a manageable, yet impactful, evolution in secure software engineering.

Read more at the link here.