Leaders in Industry Support White House Call to Address Root Cause of Many of the Worst Cyber Attacks Read the full report here WASHINGTON – Today, the White House Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD) released a report calling on the technical community to proactively reduce the attack surface in cyberspace. ONCD makes the…
On the one side I really like c and c++ because they’re fun and have great performance; they don’t feel like your fighting the language and let me feel sort of creative in the way I do things(compared with something like Rust or Swift).
On the other hand, when weighing one’s feelings against the common good, I guess it’s not really a contest. Plus I suspect a lot of my annoyance with languages like rust stems from not being as familiar with the paradigm. What do you all think?
In cases where bugs have been counted they tended to make up the majority of vulnerabilities. Chrome, Firefox, and Windows reported that around 70% of security vulnerabilites were memory corruption. Yes a subset, but the majority of the worst subset.
I’ve also heard that unsafe Rust is even more dangerous than C. I guess that’s probably something to do with the fact that you’re always on your toes in C vs Rust? I don’t know. But if you need to do any sort of manual memory management you’re going to need unsafe Rust.
No, rust is stricter because you need to think a lot more about whether weird edge cases in your unsafe code can potentially cause UB. For ex. If your data structure relies on the Ord interface (which gives you comparison operators and total ordering), and someone implements Ord wrong, you aren’t allowed to commit UB still. In C++ land I’d venture to guess most any developer won’t care - that’s a bug with your code and not the data structure.
It’s also more strict because rusts referencing rules are a lot harder then C’s, since they’re all effectively restrict by default, and just turning a pointer into a reference for a little bit to call a function means that you have to abide by those restrictions now without the help of the compiler.
Unsafe code should be a very, very small part of any Rust codebase. Lots of major libraries have a policy against including any unsafe code at all, because 99.9% of the time you can do just as well with safe cost. The major exception is when you need to call C code.
The thing is the whole c program is unsafe. In rust individual parts are marked unsafe. This means auditing should be easier. Also being always on your toes isn’t really viable. Breaking down the program into safe vs unsafe is probably an improvment
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In cases where bugs have been counted they tended to make up the majority of vulnerabilities. Chrome, Firefox, and Windows reported that around 70% of security vulnerabilites were memory corruption. Yes a subset, but the majority of the worst subset.
I’ve also heard that unsafe Rust is even more dangerous than C. I guess that’s probably something to do with the fact that you’re always on your toes in C vs Rust? I don’t know. But if you need to do any sort of manual memory management you’re going to need unsafe Rust.
No, rust is stricter because you need to think a lot more about whether weird edge cases in your unsafe code can potentially cause UB. For ex. If your data structure relies on the
Ordinterface (which gives you comparison operators and total ordering), and someone implements Ord wrong, you aren’t allowed to commit UB still. In C++ land I’d venture to guess most any developer won’t care - that’s a bug with your code and not the data structure.It’s also more strict because rusts referencing rules are a lot harder then C’s, since they’re all effectively
restrictby default, and just turning a pointer into a reference for a little bit to call a function means that you have to abide by those restrictions now without the help of the compiler.Unsafe code should be a very, very small part of any Rust codebase. Lots of major libraries have a policy against including any unsafe code at all, because 99.9% of the time you can do just as well with safe cost. The major exception is when you need to call C code.
The thing is the whole c program is unsafe. In rust individual parts are marked unsafe. This means auditing should be easier. Also being always on your toes isn’t really viable. Breaking down the program into safe vs unsafe is probably an improvment