Wednesday
Room 4
10:20 - 11:20
(UTC+02)
Talk (60 min)
Signed Integers Considered Harmful
A common misconception among C++ developers is that signed integers should be the default integer type, or put another way, that unsigned integers should only be used when modulo behavior is desired.
In reality, for safe, secure, and performant systems the opposite is true and unsigned integers should be the default type for representing integer that cannot have negative values. This goal of this presentation is to provide an irrefutable argument supporting this assertion and put an end to the madness.
Robert Seacord
Robert C. Seacord is the Standardization Lead at Woven Planet he works on the Software Craft. Robert was previously a Technical Director at NCC Group, Secure Coding Manager at Carnegie Mellon's Software Engineering Institute, and an adjunct professor in the School of Computer Science and the Information Networking Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.
He is the author of seven books, including Effective C: An Introduction to Professional C Programming (No Starch Press, 2020), The CERT C Coding Standard, Second Edition (Addison-Wesley, 2014) Secure Coding in C and C++, Second Edition (Addison-Wesley, 2013). Robert has been teaching secure coding in C and C++ to private industry, academia, and government since 2005.
Robert is on the Advisory Board for the Linux Foundation is the incoming convener of the ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG14 international standardization working group for the C programming language.