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Java: The Language of Security


Fortify report claims that software written in Java is most secure

By Jeff Feinman
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April 1, 2007 —  (Page 1 of 2)
Software components written in Java are more secure than components written in other languages such as C, C++ or PHP, according to a report from Fortify Software.

The report was released through Fortify’s Java Open Review Project, a free initiative to help open source developers detect security vulnerabilities and bugs. The report states that on average, only .07 security and quality defects were found for every thousand lines of code in a review of multiple open source projects written in Java. By contrast, according to the report, non-Java based software being developed contains 20 to 30 security and quality defects for every thousand lines of code written.

Fortify claims that Java is the safest way of writing because of its conservative architecture, which doesn’t lend itself to memory vulnerabilities, such as buffer overflows. The Java memory manager ensures that parameters that are going into random access memory operations are in check, according to the company. Using a garbage collector to reclaim memory occupied by inaccessible objects can help to prevent such vulnerabilities.

“It kind of stops you from doing stupid mistakes,” said Barmak Meftah, vice president of products and services for Fortify. “C and C++ are fairly open languages, and so they’re very non-conservative in their approach to garbage collection and memory management. The majority of developers don’t necessarily think of security when they code, and so Java does a really good job of ensuring that you don’t make mistakes.”

However, analyst Jon Rymer of Forrester Research said he is not convinced that evaluating security-related features of languages is very useful. “I don’t believe it’s reasonable to say that any language is inherently more secure than any other language,” he said. “Languages are just products, and so subject to human error in their application. The last five or so years of hacker attacks, I think, say primarily that the various vulnerabilities of runtime environments—Web servers, databases, e-mail servers, desktop apps—are the real problems.”




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