Security Experts:

Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

SecurityWeekSecurityWeek

Application Security

Rust Gets a Dedicated Security Team

The non-profit Rust Foundation has scored funding to build a dedicated security team to proactively identify and address security defects in the popular Rust programming language.

The non-profit Rust Foundation has scored funding to build a dedicated security team to proactively identify and address security defects in the popular Rust programming language.

The Foundation said the new team will be funded by investments from the OpenSSF’s Alpha-Omega Initiative and software supply chain security firm Jfrog and will immediately work on a security audit and threat modeling to measure the economics of securing Rust.

“The first initiative for the new Security Team will be to undertake a security audit and threat modeling exercises to identify how security can be economically maintained going forward. The team will also help advocate for security practices across the Rust landscape, including Cargo and Crates.io, and will be a resource for the maintainer community,” the Foundation said in a statement.

The OpenSSF Alpha-Omega Project is an ambitious effort aimed at tackling open source software security through direct engagement of software security experts and automated security testing.  The Project is funded collectively by Microsoft and Google.

“There’s often a misperception that because Rust ensures memory safety that it’s one hundred percent secure, but Rust can be vulnerable just like any other language and warrants proactive measures to protect and sustain it and the community,” said Bec Rumbul, Executive Director at the Rust Foundation. 

[ READ: Cost of Sandboxing Prompts Shift to Memory-Safe Languages. Too Late? ]

Rumbul said the new Rust Foundation Security Team will be able to support the broader Rust community with the highest-level of security talent and help ensure the reliability of Rust for software developers around the world.

Of course, this is just a start. We hope to continue to build out the team in the coming months and years,” Rumbul added.

Separately, maintainers of the Go programming language have announced new support for vulnerability management as a first step towards helping Go developers learn about known vulnerabilities that may affect them.

The Go initiative includes a vulnerability database and a new govulncheck tool that offers a low-noise, reliable way for Go users to learn about known vulnerabilities that may affect their projects. Govulncheck analyzes codebases and only flags vulnerabilities with impact based on which functions in the code are transitively calling vulnerable functions. 

Related: Cost of Sandboxing Prompts Shift to Memory-Safe Languages. Too Late?

Related: Google Working on Improving Memory Safety in Chrome

Related: Microsoft Launches JIT-Free ‘Super Duper Secure Mode’ Edge Browser

Related: OpenSSF Alpha-Omega Project Tackles Supply Chain Security

Written By

Ryan Naraine is Editor-at-Large at SecurityWeek and host of the popular Security Conversations podcast series. He is a security community engagement expert who has built programs at major global brands, including Intel Corp., Bishop Fox and GReAT. Ryan is a founding-director of the Security Tinkerers non-profit, an advisor to early-stage entrepreneurs, and a regular speaker at security conferences around the world.

Click to comment

Daily Briefing Newsletter

Subscribe to the SecurityWeek Email Briefing to stay informed on the latest threats, trends, and technology, along with insightful columns from industry experts.

Join this webinar to learn best practices that organizations can use to improve both their resilience to new threats and their response times to incidents.

Register

Join this live webinar as we explore the potential security threats that can arise when third parties are granted access to a sensitive data or systems.

Register

Expert Insights

Related Content

Application Security

Cycode, a startup that provides solutions for protecting software source code, emerged from stealth mode on Tuesday with $4.6 million in seed funding.

Vulnerabilities

Less than a week after announcing that it would suspended service indefinitely due to a conflict with an (at the time) unnamed security researcher...

Data Protection

The CRYSTALS-Kyber public-key encryption and key encapsulation mechanism recommended by NIST for post-quantum cryptography has been broken using AI combined with side channel attacks.

Data Protection

The cryptopocalypse is the point at which quantum computing becomes powerful enough to use Shor’s algorithm to crack PKI encryption.

Cybercrime

The changing nature of what we still generally call ransomware will continue through 2023, driven by three primary conditions.

Cyberwarfare

WASHINGTON - Cyberattacks are the most serious threat facing the United States, even more so than terrorism, according to American defense experts. Almost half...

Data Breaches

LastPass DevOp engineer's home computer hacked and implanted with keylogging malware as part of a sustained cyberattack that exfiltrated corporate data from the cloud...

Application Security

PayPal is alerting roughly 35,000 individuals that their accounts have been targeted in a credential stuffing campaign.