A lot of the most serious security vulnerabilities are memory safety because e.g. remote code execution is very often along the lines of "LOL, I smash buffer with machine code, it gets executed" and that's a memory safety problem.
For sudo you have potential for some very serious logic bugs, where the program does exactly what the programmer wrote, but what they wrote was not what they intended.
Rust's type safety makes it less vulnerable to these mistakes than some languages, but there is no magic. In C obviously a UID, a PID, a duration, an inode number, a file descriptor, a counter are all just integers. In Rust you could make all those distinct types (the "New type idiom"), and out of the box the Duration and the File Descriptor are in fact provided as distinct types. So, some improvement.
> In C obviously a UID, a PID, a duration, an inode number, a file descriptor, a counter are all just integers. In Rust you could make all those distinct types
For various kinds of IDs you can do that in C, too:
It may be not as nice as other languages, but it isn’t bad, either. If you use C++, it can be made a bit nicer, and you could also have such structs that you can calculate with.
You can technically do this but then you have to write wrapper functions for all relevant syscalls or libc functions to unpack the structure and call the actual thing. Lots of work.
For sudo you have potential for some very serious logic bugs, where the program does exactly what the programmer wrote, but what they wrote was not what they intended.
Rust's type safety makes it less vulnerable to these mistakes than some languages, but there is no magic. In C obviously a UID, a PID, a duration, an inode number, a file descriptor, a counter are all just integers. In Rust you could make all those distinct types (the "New type idiom"), and out of the box the Duration and the File Descriptor are in fact provided as distinct types. So, some improvement.