Methods for the prevention, detection and removal of software security vulnerabilities

Over the past decade, the need to build secure software has become a dominant goal in software development. Consequently, software researchers and practitioners have identified ways that malicious users can exploit software and how developers can fix the vulnerabilities. They have also built a variety of source code security checking software applications to partially automate the task of performing a security analysis of a program. Although great advances have been made in this area, the core problem of how the security vulnerabilities occur still exists. An answer to this problem could be a paradigm shift from imperative to functional programming techniques. This may hold the key to removing software vulnerabilities altogether.