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Comment by dvtkrlbs | Hacker News Reader

Pretty consistently [1] [2] [3] [4] it comes out that nearly %80 of security vulnerabilities come from memory safety vulnerabilities. I would consider that largest. Especially Microsoft's doc is pretty telling that this ratio was pretty consistent since 2006 so no amount of external tooling and training solves this. [1] https://langui.sh/2019/07/23/apple-memory-safety/ (albeit apple solving this with an another language and a really nice cpu extension) [2] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/msrc/blog/2019/07/we-need-a-... [3] https://security.googleblog.com/2019/05/queue-hardening-enha... [4] https://x.com/LazyFishBarrel/status/1129000965741404160

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In which code though? What counts as a security vulnerability (does the design of the play store such that searching for an app and the top result not being that app count)? I like everyone else want a secure browser, but my secure browser isn't going to prevent my email (or passwords) from appearing on https://haveibeenpwned.com/. I like rust, and want to write more rust, but if I were to port openssh to rust, I guarantee my rust code would have more CVEs than openssh.

My feeling is in the specific instance of using rust in apt, this is most likely a good thing (though I hope existing well tested rust libraries are used rather than NIHing them and introducing new bugs), but so far Ubuntu's rustification has not gone smoothly, so I'm more wary of the changes that e.g. improvements to Firefox via rust.

I don't agree with openssh take but yeah we don't need to migrate everything to rust and yeah a migration not always goes smoothly I am using sudo-rs on my arch install for over a year havent had any issues yet.

> though I hope existing well tested rust libraries are used rather than NIHing them and introducing new bugs

I think that's much more likely to introduce bugs.

Think of it that way, a lot of the Rust libraries are rewriting existing copyleft libraries in permissive licenses, so they cannot look at the original code, dooming them to repeat the mistakes that were made in the original code and having to fix them all over again on their own (as both go from "oh this is simple" to "oh another corner case").

I just want to translate code 1:1 to Rust, reusing my existing knowledge, design decisions, and tests. It should behave _exactly_ the same as before, just memory safe.

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