Type Safety and Security
Type-safe code accesses only the memory locations it is authorized to access. (For this discussion, type safety specifically refers to memory type safety and should not be confused with type safety in a broader respect.) For example, type-safe code cannot read values from another object's private fields. It accesses types only in well-defined, allowable ways.
During just-in-time (JIT) compilation, an optional verification process examines the metadata and Microsoft intermediate language (MSIL) of a method to be JIT-compiled into native machine code to verify that they are type safe. This process is skipped if the code has permission to bypass verification. For more information about verification, see Compiling MSIL to Native Code.
Although verification of type safety is not mandatory to run managed code, type safety plays a crucial role in assembly isolation and security enforcement. When code is type safe, the common language runtime can completely isolate assemblies from each other. This isolation helps ensure that assemblies cannot adversely affect each other and it increases application reliability. Type-safe components can execute safely in the same process even if they are trusted at different levels. When code is not type safe, unwanted side effects can occur. For example, the runtime cannot prevent unmanaged code from calling into native (unmanaged) code and performing malicious operations. When code is type safe, the runtime's security enforcement mechanism ensures that it does not access native code unless it has permission to do so. All code that is not type safe must have been granted SecurityPermission with the passed enum member SkipVerification to run.
See Also
Concepts
Writing Verifiably Type-Safe Code