Worst languages for software security

I was sent an article about program languages that generate most security bugs in software today. The article seemed to refer to a report by Veracode, a company I know well, to discuss what software security problems are out there in applications written in different languages. That is an excellent question and a very interesting subject for a discussion. Except that the article really failed to discuss anything, making instead misleading and incoherent statements about both old-school lnguages like C/C++ and the PHP scripting. I fear we will have to look into this problem ourselves then instead.

So, what languages are the worst when it comes to software security? Are they the old C and C++, like so many proponents of Java would like us to believe? Or are they the new and quickly developing languages with little enforcement of structure, like PHP? Let’s go to Veracode and get their report: “State of Software Security. Focus on Application Development. Supplement to Volume 6.”

The report includes a very informative diagram showing what percentage of applications passes the OWASP policy for a secure application out of the box grouped by the language of the application. OWASP policy is defined as “not containing any of the security problems mentioned on the OWASP Top 10 most important vulnerabilities for web application” and OWASP is the accepted industry authority on web application security. So if they say that something is a serious vulnerability, you can be sure it is. Let’s look at the diagram:

Fully 60% of applications written in C/C++ come without those most severe software security vulnerabilities listed by OWASP. That is a very good result and a notable achievement. Next, down one and a half to two times, come the three mobile platforms. And the next actual programming language, .NET, comes out more than two times as bad! Java is 2 and a half times as bad as C/C++. The scripting languages are three times as bad.

Think about it. Applications written in Java are almost three times as likely to contain security vulnerabilities as those written in C/C++. And C/C++ is the only language that gives you a more than 50% chance of not having serious security vulnerabilities in your application.

Why is that?

The reasons are many. For one thing, Java has never delivered on its promises of security, stability and uniformity. People must struggle with issues that have been long resolved in other languages, like the idiotic memory management and garbage collection, reinventing the wheel on any more or less non-trivial piece of software. The language claims to be “easy” and “fool-proof” while letting people to compare string objects instead of strings with an equal operator unknowingly. The discrepancy between the fantasy and reality is huge in the Java world and getting worse all the time.

Still, the main reason, I think, is the quality of the developer: both the level of developer knowledge, expertise, as it were, and the sheer carelessness of the Java programmers. Where C/C++ developers are actually masters of the software development, the Java developers are most of the time just coders. That makes a difference. People learn Java in all sorts of courses or by themselves – companies constantly hire Java developers, so it makes sense to follow the market demand. Except that those people are kids with an ad-hoc knowledge of a programming language and absolutely no concept of software engineering. As opposed to that, most C/C++ people are actually engineers and they know much better what they are doing, even when they write things in a different language. But the “coders” are much cheaper than real engineers, so the companies developing in Java end up with lots of those and the software quality goes down the drain.

The difference in the quality of the software is easily apparent when you compare the diagrams for types of the issues detected mostly from the same report:

You can see that code quality problems are only 27% of the total number of issues detected in the case of C/C++ while for Java code the code quality issues represent the whopping 80% of total.

Think again. The code written in Java has several time worse quality than the code written in C/C++.

It is not surprising that the quality problems result in security vulnerabilities. Both quality and security go hand in hand and require discipline and knowledge on the part of developer. Where one suffers, the other inevitably does as well.

The conclusion: if you want secure software, you want C/C++. You definitely do not want Java. And even if you are stuck with Java, you still want to have C/C++ developers to write your Java code because they are more likely to write better and more secure software.