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Not to say they don’t exist or haven’t been reported, but many of the unsound issues on github for Rust don’t seem to hold water. They all seem to misbehave on
by jkelleyrtp 6y ago
Not to say they don’t exist or haven’t been reported, but many of the unsound issues on github for Rust don’t seem to hold water.
They all seem to misbehave on a single nightly build, affect only a very narrow and unsupported target group, be related to a bug in a unsupported release of LLVM, or simply aren’t reproducible. I think the percentage of security bugs in Rust related to memory safety, based off that list, is _effectively_ 0%. I can’t find an issue in the list that seems like it would impact Rust programs that people write today or on targets that people deploy Rust code where memory safety matters.
- nindalf 6y agoThat probably reflects the higher standards in the Rust ecosystem. I remember when there was a big issue about “Pin is unsound”. Judging by how seriously people were taking it, it seemed like it was the next Heartbleed. Turned out that it was unsound only in a very contrived example. Still, it was cool that it was fixed so quickly.
- scottlamb 6y agoMost of the currently open ones may be nightly-only and/or mostly theoretical, but there was recently a bad borrow checker bug for example: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2020/02/27/Rust-1.41.1.html#a-soundness-hole-in-checking-static-items https://blog.rust-lang.org/2020/02/27/Rust-1.41.1.html#a-sou... I don't think soundness/security flaws due to compiler bugs are common, but they qualitatively can happen. I think that might be getting forgotten when folks are puzzled about the idea of memory safety bugs in memory-safe languages.