Memory safety

Convert untrusted office documents and PDFs in an isolated parser

DOCX, XLSX and ODF files are ZIP archives of XML, and PDFs can carry scripts; the converters that read them are large C and C++ programs with a long CVE history. Check the package before any parser reads it, convert each document in a container with no network, no writable root and hard limits, kill it at a deadline, and re-render to pixels when people will open the result.

Design, Development · Developers, AppSec engineers, Platform engineers and SREs

Fuzz a parser and turn crashes into lasting regressions

Build a narrow harness, observe memory and resource failures, minimize the input, and test the repaired parser.

Testing · Developers, AppSec engineers

Find, fix and contain memory-safety bugs in C and C++

Recognize out-of-bounds access, use after free, NULL dereference and integer overflow in C and C++, fix them with checked lengths and single ownership, harden release builds, catch the rest with sanitizers and fuzzing, and plan new code in a memory-safe language.

Development, Testing · Developers, Platform engineers and SREs

Audit unsafe Rust, FFI boundaries and crate dependencies

Know what the Rust compiler proves and what it leaves to you: review unsafe code for soundness, wrap foreign calls in small safe functions, decide how overflow and panics behave in release builds, gate crates with RustSec, and replace C one boundary at a time.

Development · Developers, AppSec engineers

Case study: Citrix Bleed (CVE-2023-4966)

How a NetScaler memory over-read leaked session cookies that bypassed passwords and MFA in 2023, why patching did not end hijacked sessions, and how the pattern returned in 2025.

Maintenance · Developers, AppSec engineers

Case study: CrowdStrike Channel File 291 (July 2024)

How a CrowdStrike content update crashed Windows hosts in July 2024: a field-count mismatch hidden by wildcard tests, a missing bounds check, and no staged rollout.

Development, Release, Maintenance · Developers, Platform engineers and SREs

Apply CISA Secure by Design: principles, pledge goals and evidence

What CISA's Secure by Design guidance and pledge ask of software manufacturers as of October 2026, and how to turn each of the three principles, the seven pledge goals and the Product Security Bad Practices into engineering actions, metrics and evidence.

Security program · AppSec engineers, Security leaders

Buffer over-read lab: Stop a heartbeat over-read

A model of C memory: a TLS heartbeat handler echoes as many bytes as the request claims, not as many as arrived, so a short request returns the next client’s cookie, as Heartbleed did. Add the bounds checks.