A Viewpoint: Harmonizing the Diverse Memory Safety Fronts

Significant advances have recently been made in memory safety protection, including the wider deploy-ment of new memory-safe languages and architectural security features in COTS hardware. However, real-world constraints and requirements often necessitate various trade-offs that may weaken security. This is particularly true when protection is deployed in mixed environments, including software, libraries, and ser-vices with different or incompatible security mecha-nisms and policies. To succeed in such real-world het-erogeneous systems, memory safety solutions cannot remain isolated and must be considered part of an interactive whole.