Key Features that Make Java More Secure than Other Languages

Java’s security model

Java’s security model is intended to help and protect users from hostile programs downloaded from some untrusted resource within a network through “sandbox”. It allows all the Java programs to run inside the sandbox only and prevents many activities from untrusted resources including reading or writing to the local disk, creating any new process or even loading any new dynamic library while calling a native method.

No use of pointers

C/C++ language uses pointers, which may cause unauthorized access to memory blocks when other programs get the pointer values. Unlike conventional C/C++ language, Java never uses any kind of pointers. Java has its internal mechanism for memory management. It only gives access to the data to the program if has appropriate verified authorization.

Exception handling concept

The concept of exception handling enables Java to capture a series of errors that helps developers to get rid of risk of crashing the system.

Defined order execution

All the primitives are defined with a predefined size and all the operations are defined in a specific order of execution. Therefore, the code executed in different Java Virtual Machines won’t have  a different order of execution.

Byte code is another thing that makes Java more secure

Every time when a user compiles the Java program, the Java compiler creates a class file with Bytecode, which are tested by the JVM at the time of program execution for viruses and other malicious files.

Tested code re-usability

The Java object encapsulation provides support for the concept of “programming by contract”. This allows the developers to re-use the code that has already been tested while developing Java enterprise applications.

Access Control functionality

Java’s access-control functionality on variables and methods within the objects provide secure program by preventing access to the critical objects from the untrusted code.

Protection from security attacks

It allows developers to declare classes or methods as FINAL. We all know that any class or method declared as final can’t be overridden, which helps developers to protect code from security attacks like creating a subclass and replacing it with the original class and override methods.

Garbage collection mechanism

Garbage collection mechanism aids more to the security measures of Java. It provides a transparent storage allocation and recovering unutilized memory rather than deallocating memory through manual action. It will help developers to ensure the integrity of the program during its execution and avoids any JVM crash due to incorrect freeing of memory.

Type-safe reference casting in JVM

Whenever you use an object reference, the JVM monitors you. If you try to cast a reference to a different type, it will make the cast invalid.  

Apart from all these, structured error handling contributes a lot to the security model of Java by helping to enhance the robustness of the programs. The above arguments definitely prove that the projects developed in Java are more secure as compared to the other programming language. However, it is the responsibility of the developers to follow some best practices while developing enterprise-level Java applications.