Good intro to the benefits of Rust for a broad audience, but one important omission: the Use-After-Free and Double-Free protection he mentioned is provided by compile-time static analysis, but Rust also does runtime bounds checks to prevent classic stack smashing (with minimal performance overhead).
That may not seem like a big deal for the x86_64 world where modern mitigations largely make shellcode a thing of the past (hence heap exploitation, ROP/JOP, etc) but it is a BIG DEAL for embedded microcontrollers that lack OS/HW memory protection - an area where #![no_std] Rust shines.
As a security researcher and not a developer, let me be very frank: you should STRONGLY consider Rust in place of C or C++. But know that release profile builds don't do integer overflow checking, so don't get cocky :P
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Good intro to the benefits of Rust for a broad audience, but one important omission: the Use-After-Free and Double-Free protection he mentioned is provided by compile-time static analysis, but Rust also does runtime bounds checks to prevent classic stack smashing (with minimal performance overhead).
That may not seem like a big deal for the x86_64 world where modern mitigations largely make shellcode a thing of the past (hence heap exploitation, ROP/JOP, etc) but it is a BIG DEAL for embedded microcontrollers that lack OS/HW memory protection - an area where #![no_std] Rust shines.
As a security researcher and not a developer, let me be very frank: you should STRONGLY consider Rust in place of C or C++. But know that release profile builds don't do integer overflow checking, so don't get cocky :P
Just to add to that: Integer overflows in release builds can be turned on, and even when they are off, at very least they are not UBs. More info in http://huonw.github.io/blog/2016/04/myths-and-legends-about-....
Thanks for pointing that out and linking through to a great resource!