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by groundzeros2015 127 days ago
What are you hoping it will achieve?
1 comments

The internet went down because cloudflare used a bad config... a config parsed by a rust app.

One of these days the witch hunt against C will go away.

A service going down is a million times better than being exploited by an attacker. If this is a witch hunt then C is an actual witch.
Why can it be exploited? I’ve configured my OS so my process is isolated to the resources it needs.
What language is your OS written in?
It’s written in C I’m glad you asked. Do you have any exploits in the Linux process encapsulation to share?

Surely your not suggesting that the Rust compiler never produces exploitable code?

I probably don’t have such an exploit, since you’re probably running something up to date. There have been many in the past. I doubt the last one to be fixed is the last one to exist.

If your attitude is that getting exploited doesn’t matter because your software is unprivileged, you need some part of your stack to be unexploitable. That’s a tall order if everything is C.

You can get exploitable code out of any compiler. But you’re far more likely to get it from real-world C than real-world Rust.

The internet didn't go down and you're mischaracterizing it as a parsing issue when the list would've exceeded memory allocation limits. They didn't hardcode a fallback config for that case. What memory safety promise did Rust fail there exactly?
I think the point is memory bugs are only one (small) subset of bugs.
The conventional wisdom is ~70% of serious security bugs are memory safety issues.

https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2023-12/CSAC_TAC_Re...

Security bugs - and not bad security processes, are a small subset of bugs.
A panic in Rust is easier to diagnose and fix than some error or grabage data that was caused by an out of bounds access in some random place in the call stack