Rust Foundation Forms Dedicated Security Team to Enhance Language Integrity
The Rust Foundation, which oversees the development and growth of the Rust programming language, has taken a major step toward bolstering the security of the language by forming a dedicated security team. This move is aimed at reinforcing Rust’s reputation as a secure and reliable tool for building software, particularly in systems programming, embedded development, and high-performance applications. The creation of this team signifies the Rust community’s commitment to maintaining the highest security standards as the language continues to evolve and gain widespread adoption.
Despite Rust’s inherent memory safety features, which minimize certain classes of vulnerabilities like buffer overflows and data races, security experts recognize that no language is entirely immune to threats. As Bec Rumbul, the Rust Foundation’s executive director, pointed out in a September 13 statement, the perception that Rust’s memory safety guarantees make it invulnerable is not entirely accurate. In reality, like any language, Rust can still have vulnerabilities that could be exploited, especially as it becomes more widely used in critical areas such as web assembly, blockchain, and IoT. The newly established security team will take a proactive stance on identifying and addressing these potential risks.
The security team will be primarily funded and supported by the OpenSSF Alpha-Omega Initiative, a project under the Linux Foundation that focuses on securing open-source software supply chains, as well as JFrog, a company specializing in devops tools and security solutions. These two organizations will contribute both financial resources and personnel to ensure the security team has the capacity to carry out its mission. The team will conduct security audits, threat modeling, and review Rust’s ecosystems, including Cargo (the package manager) and the Crates.io registry, to identify and mitigate risks.
One of the first tasks the security team will undertake is performing a comprehensive security audit of Rust’s codebase and ecosystem, including threat modeling exercises to map out potential vulnerabilities and establish strategies to address them. Beyond identifying weaknesses, the team will also help foster a security-conscious culture within the broader Rust community, advocating for best practices and offering guidance to developers on how to write secure Rust code. This effort aligns with the Rust Foundation’s broader goal of ensuring that Rust remains a safe, reliable, and secure language for developers across various industries.