Security Fundamentals

C++ inherits every memory-safety concern covered in Learn C's Security Fundamentals lesson — buffer overflows, use-after-free, uninitialized reads — but modern C++ idioms meaningfully reduce how often they occur in practice:

• std::string/std::vector instead of raw arrays — both manage their own bounds and memory, eliminating the classic buffer-overflow class of bug by construction.
• Smart pointers instead of raw new/delete — removes most use-after-free and double-free bugs, the same way RAII removes most resource leaks.
• .at() instead of [] when bounds safety genuinely matters more than the small performance cost of the check.
• Compiling with sanitizers during development (-fsanitize=address,undefined), exactly as recommended for C.

Common mistakes

• Assuming "modern C++" style automatically makes code memory-safe — it drastically reduces the chance of these bugs, but raw pointers, reinterpret_cast, and manual memory tricks are all still legal C++ and still just as dangerous when used.