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
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.
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