core-foundation-rs VS MSRC-Security-Research

Rust has RAII so you can have retain on 'clone' operations and release on drops, just like the native Rc/Arc types do.

This is, incidentally, how the servo bindings to core-foundation work (I prefer those bindings where there is overlap).

Servo bindings: https://github.com/servo/core-foundation-rs

Other crates of interest on this topic:

For Mac fans, the closest you'll have to this in OS-X is core-foundation-rs[1], by the servo team.

[1] https://github.com/servo/core-foundation-rs

Core-Foundation

You’ll find more primary sources across different organizations that all arrive at the 60 - 70% number. But what really grinds my gears here is that you take a piece from the article you’re criticizing and pretend that it’s a quote from Matt Miller.

It’s actually quite easy to find a primary source here because the slides from the talk that the article is based on are available: https://github.com/microsoft/MSRC-Security-Research/blob/mas...

To quote from those slides: „~70% of the vulnerabilities addressed through a security update each year continue to be memory safety issues“.

> It's still bizarre though that Rust is capturing such ridiculous mindshare.

I don't think it's that bizarre. The two big headline features that bring Rust such popularity are: #1 "70% of bugs are memory-safety bugs" [1] and Rust can help solve those, and #2 C/C++ have a couple of package manager solutions - none of which have critical mass and Rust "comes with" cargo.

Those two make me really eager to continue experimenting with Rust.

> It seems to be a temporary low-level programming zeitgeist driven by YouTube and Reddit recommendation algorithms to an audience that has never done it and probably never will.

This is some weird gatekeep-y kinda thing. Most of us didn't start out with low-level programming. Wouldn't it have been odd and frustrating for someone to tell your younger self that you have "never written C and probably never will"?

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/MSRC-Security-Research

https://github.com/microsoft/MSRC-Security-Research/blob/mas...

Windows is likely a big task for the same reasons as SMAP (https://github.com/microsoft/MSRC-Security-Research/blob/mas...). XNU should be comparable to FreeBSD, which CheriBSD is a fork of, as both use Mach's VM for memory management and have a bunch of shared code in various places, but userspace is more of an unknown quite how much effort it'd be (you'll need to port Objective-C and, now, Swift, for example). For Chromium we have ported WebKit, so I'd imagine Blink isn't too dissimilar. V8 is likely interesting, though we have a version of WebKit's JSC JIT for Morello, which gives confidence in V8 being doable.

A related post from Google Security Blog[0]:

> "A recent study[1] found that "~70% of the vulnerabilities addressed through a security update each year continue to be memory safety issues.” Another analysis on security issues in the ubiquitous `curl` command line tool showed that 53 out of 95 bugs would have been completely prevented by using a memory-safe language. [...]"

[0]: https://security.googleblog.com/2021/02/mitigating-memory-sa...

[1]: https://github.com/Microsoft/MSRC-Security-Research/blob/mas...

Here is some of the internal advocacy going on at Microsoft.

- Managed languages if you can afford a GC

- Rust

- C++ with Core Guidelines

https://github.com/microsoft/MSRC-Security-Research/tree/mas...

Note that there are still some teams like Azure Sphere and Azure RTOS, which are only providing C based SDKs, so no everyone is on the same wave length.