Tag: rust
Google Reports Decline In Android Memory Safety Vulnerabilities As Rust Usage Grows
That count is for “vulnerabilities reported in the Android security bulletin, which includes critical/high severity vulnerabilities reported through our vulnerability rewards program (VRP) and vulnerabilities reported internally.” During that period, the amount of new memory-unsafe code entering Android has decreased: “Android 13 is the first Android release where a majority of new code added to the release is in a memory safe language. ”
Rust makes up 21% of all new native code in Android 13, including the Ultra-wideband (UWB) stack, DNS-over-HTTP3, Keystore2, Android’s Virtualization framework (AVF), and “various other components and their open source dependencies.” Google considers it significant that there have been “zero memory safety vulnerabilities discovered in Android’s Rust code” so far across Android 12 and 13. Google’s blog post today also talks about non-memory-safety vulnerabilities, and its future plans: “… We’re implementing userspace HALs in Rust. We’re adding support for Rust in Trusted Applications. We’ve migrated VM firmware in the Android Virtualization Framework to Rust. With support for Rust landing in Linux 6.1 we’re excited to bring memory-safety to the kernel, starting with kernel drivers.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Linux Kernel Gets More Infrastructure for Rust, Increasing Interest in the Language
And there’s still no actual Rust code in Linux:
“You need to get all those things that can make sure that Rust can compile, and you can do the debugging and all these things,” explained Joel Marcey, director of advocacy and operations for the Rust Foundation, “and make sure that the memory safety is there and all that sort of stuff. And that has to happen first before you can actually write any real code in Rust for the Linux kernel itself.”
Marcey explained that Linux is going to be doing this inclusion very piecemeal, with lots of little integrations here and there over time so they can see how it is working. “I would imagine that over the next year, you’re going to see more small incremental changes to the kernel with Rust, but as people are seeing that it’s actually kind of working out, you’ll be able to maybe, for example, write Linux drivers or whatever with Rust,” said Marcey….
According to Bec Rumbul, executive director of the Rust Foundation, Rust being added to the kernel is an “enormous vote of confidence in the Rust programming language.” She explained that in the past other languages have been planned to make it into the kernel and ended up not getting put in. “I think having someone with the kind of intellectual gravity of Linus Torvalds saying ‘No, it’s going in there,’ that kind of says an awful lot about how reliable Rust already is and how much potential there is for the future as well,” she said.
Rumbul believes that there will be an increased interest in the language, which is still relatively new (It first made its debut in 2010) compared to some of the other languages out there to choose from. “I suspect that because Rust is now in the kernel, and it’s just being talked about much … more widely, that it will seem like an attractive prospect to a lot of people that are looking to develop their skills and their knowledge,” she said. Rumbul hopes people will also be inspired to participate in the language as contributors and maintainers, because those are some of the less popular roles within open source, but are extremely critical to the health of a language, she explained.
The Rust Foundation also launched a new security team in September to ensure best practices (including a dedicated security engineer). Their first initiative will be a security audit and threat modeling exercises.
“We want to basically shore up,” Rust operations director Marcey tells SD Times, “to ensure that Rust itself is actually as secure as we always say it is.”
In this year’s Stack Overflow Developer Survey, 86.73% of developers said they love Rust.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Dark Camo Pack Available November 24 for Rust Console Edition
Survey of 26K Developers Finds Java, Python, Kotlin, and Rust Growing Rapidly
ZDNet believe it shows developers “experimenting less and sticking with what they know and what works.”
JavaScript remains the largest programming language community, SlashData found. According to its research, there are an estimated 19.6 million developers worldwide using JavaScript every day in everything from web development and mobile apps to backend coding, cloud and game design. Java, meanwhile, is growing rapidly. In the last two years, the size of the Java community has more than doubled from 8.3 million to 16.5 million, SlashData found. For perspective, the global developer population grew about half as fast over the same period….
Python also continued to grow strongly, adding about eight million new developers over the last two years, according to SlashData. It accredited the rise of data science and machine learning as “a clear factor in Python’s growing popularity”. Approximately 63% of machine-learning developers and data scientists report using Python, whereas less than 15% use R, another programming language often associated with data science.
Both the Kotlin and Rust communities doubled in size in the past two years, the article points out. But according to the survey, only 9% of developers were involved in blockchain technologies.
Yet 27% of respondents reported they were learning about (if not currently working on) cryptocurrency-based projects. ZDNet summarizes the findings:
Of the three blockchain technologies covered in the report, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) were found to be of least interest to developers: 58% showed “no interest” in NFTs, which SlashData said was “likely due to its perception as a novelty”.
The report found that one-quarter (25%) of developers currently work on, or are learning about, blockchain applications other than cryptocurrencies.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Wired Hails Rust as ‘the Viral Secure Programming Language That’s Taking Over Tech’
“Rust makes it impossible to introduce some of the most common security vulnerabilities. And its adoption can’t come soon enough….”
[A] growing movement to write software in a language called Rust is gaining momentum because the code is goof-proof in an important way. By design, developers can’t accidentally create the most common types of exploitable security vulnerabilities when they’re coding in Rust, a distinction that could make a huge difference in the daily patch parade and ultimately the world’s baseline cybersecurity….
[B]ecause Rust produces more secure code [than C] and, crucially, doesn’t worsen performance to do it, the language has been steadily gaining adherents and now is at a turning point. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon Web Services have all been utilizing Rust since 2019, and the three companies formed the nonprofit Rust Foundation with Mozilla and Huawei in 2020 to sustain and grow the language. And after a couple of years of intensive work, the Linux kernel took its first steps last month to implement Rust support. “It’s going viral as a language,” says Dave Kleidermacher, vice president of engineering for Android security and privacy. “We’ve been investing in Rust on Android and across Google, and so many engineers are like, ‘How do I start doing this? This is great’….”
By writing new software in Rust instead, even amateur programmers can be confident that they haven’t introduced any memory-safety bugs into their code…. 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….
“Yes, it’s a lot of work, it will be a lot of work, but the tech industry has how many trillions of dollars, plus how many talented programmers? We have the resources,” says Josh Aas, executive director of the Internet Security Research Group, which runs the memory-safety initiative Prossimo as well as the free certificate authority Let’s Encrypt. “Problems that are merely a lot of work are great.”
Here’s how Dan Lorenc, CEO of the software supply-chain security company Chainguard, explains it to Wired. “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.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
New Features In Rust Include Generic Associated Types (GATs) After Six-Year Wait
An earlier post pointed out that “There have been a good amount of changes that have had to have been made to the compiler to get GATs to work,” noting that the request-for-comments for this feature was first opened in 2016.
And Rust’s types team also created a blog post with more detail:
Note that this is really just rounding out the places where you can put generics: for example, you can already have generics on freestanding type aliases and on functions in traits. Now you can just have generics on type aliases in traits (which we just call associated types)….
In general, GATs provide a foundational basis for a vast range of patterns and APIs. If you really want to get a feel for how many projects have been blocked on GATs being stable, go scroll through either the tracking issue: you will find numerous issues from other projects linking to those threads over the years saying something along the lines of “we want the API to look like X, but for that we need GATs” (or see this comment that has some of these put together already). If you’re interested in how GATs enable a library to do zero-copy parsing, resulting in nearly a ten-fold performance increase, you might be interested in checking out a blog post on it by Niko Matsakis.
All in all, even if you won’t need to use GATs directly, it’s very possible that the libraries you use will use GATs either internally or publically for ergonomics, performance, or just because that’s the only way the implementation works…. [A]ll the various people involved in getting this stabilization to happen deserve the utmost thanks. As said before, it’s been 6.5 years coming and it couldn’t have happened without everyone’s support and dedication.
Rust 1.65.0 also contains let-else statements — a new kind of let statement “with a refutable pattern and a diverging else block that executes when that pattern doesn’t match,” according to the release announcement.
And it highlights another new feature:
Plain block expressions can now be labeled as a break target, terminating that block early. This may sound a little like a goto statement, but it’s not an arbitrary jump, only from within a block to its end. This was already possible with loop blocks, and you may have seen people write loops that always execute only once, just to get a labeled break.
Now there’s a language feature specifically for that! Labeled break may also include an expression value, just as with loops, letting a multi-statement block have an early “return” value.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.