Browse Teach Curate

Memory Safety

The property that a program can never read or write memory it does not own: no use-after-free, no out-of-bounds access, no uninitialized reads. Languages achieve it via garbage collection, runtime checks, or, uniquely in Rust, compile-time ownership rules.

Questions this Concept answers

Why does the kernel community treat a memory-safety defect as a security problem rather than only a stability problem?

jeremy Video

Categories of Memory Unsafety in Systems Programming Languages

Memory unsafety in systems programming is commonly categorized into three fundamental defect types—out-of-bounds access (spatial errors), uninitialized memory use, and temporal errors such as use-aft…