[rnijveld]

I’m on the team that is creating sudo-rs. I agree that just assuming that memory safety will get rid of all the bugs is just plain wrong, it will prevent some particular classes of bugs, but that is all it does.

But we do think that sudo in particular suffers from being a really old codebase, and that especially on that point we can make progress. Sudo has lots of features no longer relevant. It has a plugin interface, but that interface uses almost exclusively strings in `key=value` format, and the plugin boundaries aren’t perfect either. It has behaviors that probably almost nobody relies on and yet add complexity and increase the attack surface. If we wanted to do something about that it would mean rewriting large parts of sudo. So if we’re re-implementing sudo anyway, why not start at the basics and build it a little better.

Aside from the memory safety I think that is one of our main goals: make a simpler sudo that still has lots of the expressiveness. I hope you agree that cleaning up sudo is a good thing, and if we are doing that, we might as well take some memory safety along for the ride.

[stephc_int13]

There are risks, good old second system syndrome, but sudo is probably small enough to try.

Is it really broken though?

Improving the codebase could be simpler and safer, but less marketable maybe…