reza_n

You can use `explicit_bzero()` to bypass DCE (dead code elimination). Otherwise, simply initializing your memory before using is enough to trigger magic failures when you use-after-free. C programs barely function if they do not initialize memory. Context, I work on Varnish which the OP referenced for this.

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Bummer, he pretty much proved he was on the right path with his translation theories. Maybe this was done to protect his work? As in, hes now working to complete the translation and did not want others to beat him to it. One can hope...

Time and experience. Learning the syntax and wrapping your head around pointers and memory is the first step. After that, just try and write as much C as possible. Help out with projects, start projects, write tools and APIs. Most importantly, study existing code bases to learn real world techniques. Best case, get a C job where you have to write a diverse amount of C code day after day.

I write C full time and I love it (Varnish Cache). In our team of about 10 full time C engineers, we spend less than an hour a month dealing with things like “memory safety”. When you are writing C at a professional level, your time is spent on things like performance, algorithms, accuracy, hitting requirements, and delivering software. We have numerous safety and fuzzing systems humming in the background checking our work 24/7. The tooling ecosystem (Linux) is top notch.

(If you want to write C full time professionally too, contact me!)

This is a bit on the unsafe side since it blindly trusts user input. At minimum, there needs to be some kind of magic number in the struct header to validate its looking at the right memory. Best case, some kind of pointer accounting. Unfortunately, magic doesn't come for free.

We have no problem sharing our codebase with customers, especially if there are concerns like this. Shoot me a msg if you are genuinely interested in anything you have read.

Possibly, but memory is accessed using plain CPU instructions, so it would be hard to transparently encrypt all memory for an application at the kernel level. You do have virtual memory, but I dont think that could be leveraged for this. But who knows whats possible there, maybe if you align and address each memory value at the page boundaries and always force a page fault you could have a really poor implementation :)

Transparent disk encryption, not a problem since devices have filesystems which can implement encryption at that layer.

Yup. When something goes wrong in these kinds of applications, you sometimes tend to just randomly dump memory, which is a huge data leak. Or even worse, if someone figures out a way to force a data leak, then your are completely compromised. Having each piece of data with its own key and that key is a combination of data outside of the process address space drastically lowers the chances of data leakage and total compromise.

Edge facilities are warehouses in regional locations with excellent backbone connectivity, basically your modern datacenter. Cellphone towers can probably host a few racks, that's not a profitable business and its not "internet scale". If the regional datacenter has a 15ms ping to each tower in the region, then you have pretty good coverage.