this post was submitted on 31 May 2024
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Yet another security issue that Rust would solve.
Oh, we heard, Rust is the greatest invention since sliced bread. We heard it already. Like 65534 times.
So close to full 16-bit max. So close...
Yeah I figured he was going purposely for a memory overflow
Yeah we only need 2 brainRusts more to start seeing some fun.
Gah. I should have stated "I see what you did there." instead. ;)
Aviation, Health, Space and Car industry have only 3 certified languages that they use. Ada, C and C++. Ada is dying because there are way less young engineers who want to invest their future learning it. Then there is C and C++ but they dont offer memory safety and its really hard to master and its really hard and long (thats what she said) to certify the code when being audited for safety by a tier company.
Rust solves by default (no need to review) like 2/3 of the standard requirements those industries have and are that found in C and C++. Rust will soon be approved in this group by the car industry.
Im not a rust fan, but I have 3 things to say about rust.
Rust is automotive certified since over half a year. https://ferrous-systems.com/blog/officially-qualified-ferrocene
Could you explain the "no need to review" part? I do keep hearing good things about Rust.
These industries hire third parties to review c and c++ line per line to make sure it's memory safe. Rust by default forces you to write memory safe code, otherwise it won't even compile. The rust compiler tells where is the problem and what it expects. No only for basic Type errors but also for concurrent code.
Is it not possible to build that functionality into C/++ compilers?
its the way the language was built. Im not sure its possible without breaking C/C++ which have like 35 years + in the making. Also these concepts are have little to do with programing and more architectural designs. The designers are real engineers working on difficult concepts. All big brains tbh
I hate it when people talk about new technologies 🤬
Same. We should head back to ICQ!
eh, still beats Discord as far as I'm concerned
Yeah, but no one will hop on irc or mumble to hang out these days.
Not with that attitude!
I'm already on IRC and XMPP. be the change you want to see.
God I miss the IRC days
Yet another problem that actually updating your shit - which is trivially easy on enterprise Linux - would fix.
It's part of the 95% of problems solved by actually updating your enterprise Linux host.
unattended-upgrades and forget about it
oops, our third party application broke again
Never happened to me when set to security.
Tell me more (for real, I'm unfamiliar).
Its a Debian package that automatically upgraded packages (if they have pending security updates)
I run mine manually, good to know. Will check it out.
Any software can have security issues, including ones written in rust. Just because C/C++ allows one to shoot oneself in the foot doesn't mean it's something that's commonly allowed by anyone with any skill, it's just a bug like anything else. I swear, people advocating rust believe that it's something intrinsic in C/C++ that allows such a thing regardless of what a developer does, and it's getting tiresome.
Of course a good developer can avoid these problems for the most part. The point is that we want the bad developers to be forced to do things a safe way by default.
Even good developers make mistakes. It's really nice to catch these mistakes at compile time.
But it is, do you not understand what rust brings compared to these two languages ?
There are still slight advantages to C that probably will make some devs stick to it in specific cases
But this isn’t one of them
Serious question, how would using rust avoid this? Rust still has reference types in the background, right? Still has a way to put stuff on the heap too? Those are the only 2 requirements for reusing memory bugs
This is a use-after-free, which should be impossible in safe Rust due to the borrow checker. The only way for this to happen would be incorrect unsafe code (still possible, but dramatically reduced code surface to worry about) or a compiler bug. To allocate heap space in safe Rust, you have to use types provided by the language like
Box,Rc,Vec, etc. To free that space (in Rust terminology, dropping it by usingdrop()or letting it go out of scope) you must be the owner of it and there may be current borrows (i.e. no references may exist). Once the variable isdroped, the variable is dead so accessing it is a compiler error, and the compiler/std handles freeing the memory.There's some extra semantics to some of that but that's pretty much it. These kind of memory bugs are basically Rust's raison d'etre - it's been carefully designed to make most memory bugs impossible without using
unsafe. If you'd like more information I'd be happy to provide!The problem is bad programmers. You can write good C code but it takes more effort and security checking. You also can write vulnerable and sloppy Rust code.