Yeah, most of them were tied to undefined behavior. Example with detection method: https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/papers/stack:sosp13.pdf https://pdos.csail.mit.ed

Yeah, most of them were tied to undefined behavior. Example with detection method: https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/papers/stack:sosp13.pdf https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/papers/stack:sosp13.pdf One of the main ones that can do it without undefined behavior, or at least what I was told was undefined behavior, is optimizations getting rid of "dead" code. It doesn't have to be using memset: just an assignment. That assignment would sometimes get removed because the compiler thought nothing would be done with the assigned data. I never read if that was in C specification since it seemed to be a common problem in optimizations. Here's a recent solution just in case you find it interesting: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurity17/sec17-yang.pdf https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurit... "These issues should be fixed at the language level so that first, a programmer can express his intentions more easily and second, that it is hard to write code which doesn't align with the programmers intention." Being a fan of Ada, SPARK, and Rust, I can't agree with you more. The problem is legacy code, esp useful FOSS, that isn't getting ported any time soon. The OS's, web browsers, and media players come to mind. We need ways to analyze, test, and compile them that mitigate risks. Hence, all these projects targeting things like C.