About this episode

The episode discusses updates to the Pointer Ownership Model for C to address temporal memory safety issues in C and C++ programming.

In October 2025, CyberPress reported a critical security vulnerability in the Redis Server, an open-source in-memory database that allowed authenticated attackers to achieve remote code execution through a use-after-free flaw in the Lua scripting engine. In 2024, another prominent temporal memory safety flaw was found in the Netfilter subsystem in the Linux kernel: CVE-2024-1086 . Bugs related to temporal memory safety, such as use-after-free and double-free vulnerabilities, are challenging issues in C and C++ code. In this podcast from the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute (SEI) , Lori Flynn , a senior software security research er in the SEI's CERT Division, and David Svoboda , a senior software engineer, also in CERT, sit down with Tim Chick , technical manager of CERT's Applied Systems Group, to discuss recent updates to the Pointer Ownership Model for C , a modeling framework designed to improve the ability of developers to statically analyze C programs for errors involving temporal memory.

People in this episode

Host: Tim Chick

Guests: Lori Flynn, David Svoboda

Topics covered

• memory safety
• C programming
• C++ programming
• security vulnerabilities
• pointer ownership model
• static analysis

Keywords

• temporal memory safety
• use-after-free
• double-free
• C programming
• C++ programming
• security vulnerabilities
• Pointer Ownership Model

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute, Redis Server, Linux

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