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by staticassertion 1465 days ago
Just to clarify, exploit generally refers to software that takes advantage of vulnerabilities, vulnerabilities are the flaws themselves. As in, one writes code to "exploit" a "vulnerability".

70% of all vulnerabilities reported to them are memory safety issues. To my knowledge, 100% of exploits against Chrome in the wild leverage memory unsafety.
2 comments
selfmodruntime 1465 days ago
How anyone can read a survey like this and still argue that the benefits of Rust (or any language with the ownership model) don't outweigh the risks / negative aspects is beyond me.
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yjftsjthsd-h 1465 days ago
Oh, that's easy; all you have to do is argue that it wasn't a representative sample. Just because 70% of security problems in Chromium are memory-safety problems doesn't mean that arbitrary project X has the same proportion or risks. Chromium is a very specific kind of application (network client that almost exclusively talks to untrusted servers, does media decoding, large, runs as an application, long-running), so it's plausible that its issues are unique.

However, it gets a lot harder to argue that it's just Chromium when Microsoft found the same thing: https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-70-percent-of-all-se... At that point, the strongest argument shifts from "Chromium is the outlier" to "my code is the outlier". And that's... possible to defend (ex. the OpenBSD folks have a track record that says they can write safe C), but certainly harder.

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staticassertion 1465 days ago
TBH it's only easy if you're ignorant. It's quite obvious to anyone who's informed or educated at all that using Rust would address major security issues. It sucks that people require so much convincing.
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comment500 1465 days ago
One caveat here is that many of the vulns used in the wild are in V8 and related to JIT code generation. Unfortunately rewriting in Rust can't really help with this.
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staticassertion 1465 days ago
Yes, that's a really good point. The vulnerabilities are across a number of components (skia, for example, is another big one) but memory safety in VMs is particularly tricky. Still, my personal, somewhat unfounded belief is that Rust has a lot of potential there.
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staticassertion 1465 days ago
Most developers understand virtually nothing about security.
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imron 1465 days ago
Good point!
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