These types of vulnerabilities aren’t just esoteric software bugs. Research and auditing have repeatedly found that they make up the majority of all software vulnerabilities. So while you can still make mistakes and create security flaws while programming in Rust, the opportunity to eliminate memory-safety vulnerabilities is significant.
“Memory-safety issues are responsible for a huge, huge percentage of all reported vulnerabilities, and this is in critical applications like operating systems, mobile phones, and infrastructure,” says Dan Lorenc, CEO of the software supply-chain security company Chainguard. “Over the decades that people have been writing code in memory-unsafe languages, we’ve tried to improve and build better tooling and teach people how to not make these mistakes, but there are just limits to how much telling people to try harder can actually work. So you need a new technology that just makes that entire class of vulnerabilities impossible, and that’s what Rust is finally bringing to the table.”
Rust is not without its skeptics and detractors. The effort over the last two years to implement Rust in Linux has been controversial, partly because adding support for any other language inherently increases complexity, and partly because of debates about how, specifically, to go about making it all work. But proponents emphasize that Rust has the necessary elements—it doesn’t cause performance loss, and it interoperates well with software written in other languages—and that it is crucial simply because it meets a dire need.
“It’s less that it’s the right choice and more that it’s ready,” Lorenc, a longtime open-source contributor and researcher, says. “There are no real alternatives right now, other than not doing anything, and that’s just not an option anymore. Continuing to use memory-unsafe code for another decade would be a massive problem for the tech industry, for national security, for everything.”
One of the biggest challenges of the transition to Rust, though, is precisely all the decades that developers have already spent writing vital code in memory-unsafe languages. Writing new software in Rust doesn’t address that massive backlog. The Linux kernel implementation, for example, is starting on the periphery by supporting Rust-based drivers, the programs that coordinate between an operating system and hardware like a printer.
“When you’re doing operating systems, speed and performance is always top-of-mind, and the parts that you’re running in C++ or C are usually the parts that you just can’t run in Java or other memory-safe languages, because of performance,” Google’s Kleidermacher says. “So to be able to run Rust and have the same performance but get the memory safety is really cool. But it’s a journey. You can’t just go and rewrite 50 million lines of code overnight, so we’re carefully picking security-critical components, and over time we’ll retrofit other things.”
In Android, Kleidermacher says a lot of encryption-key-management features are now written in Rust, as is the private internet communication feature DNS over HTTPS, a new version of the ultra-wideband chip stack, and the new Android Virtualization Framework used in Google’s custom Tensor G2 chips. He adds that the Android team is increasingly converting connectivity stacks like those for Bluetooth and Wi-Fi to Rust because they are based on complex industry standards and tend to contain a lot of vulnerabilities. In short, the strategy is to start getting incremental security benefits from converting the most exposed or vital software components to Rust first and then working inward from there.
Source by www.wired.com
