One of the things that Ada supports is the notion of strongly typed heaps, and has mechanisms to establish the max size of the heap for each "access type". This is what I think we really need. A big part of the security problem with heaps in C/C++ is that they're completely untyped, which makes it very difficult to put any semantics onto pointer dereferencing (including pointer alignment within a heap as well as access to an address that's not in the currently valid heap.)

Java fixes these problems similarly, but without Ada's control mechanisms.

Many of the security problems that we're looking to operating systems/computer architectures to fix are problems created by mediocre (but popular!) programming langauges.

dave


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