How Rust Improves the Security of Its Ecosystem

This week the non-profit Rust Foundation announced the release of a report on what their Security Initiative accomplished in the last six months of 2023. 'There is already so much to show for this initiative,' says the foundation's executive director, 'from several new open source security projects to several completed and publicly available security threat models.'

From the executive summary:
When the user base of any programming language grows, it becomes more attractive to malicious actors. As any programming language ecosystem expands with more libraries, packages, and frameworks, the surface area for attacks increases. Rust is no different. As the steward of the Rust programming language, the Rust Foundation has a responsibility to provide a range of resources to the growing Rust community. This responsibility means we must work with the Rust Project to help empower contributors to participate in a secure and scalable manner, eliminate security burdens for Rust maintainers, and educate the public about security within the Rust ecosystem...

Recent Achievements of the Security Initiative Include:
- Completing and releasing Rust Infrastructure and Crates Ecosystem threat models
- Further developing Rust Foundation open source security project Painter [for building a graph database of dependencies/invocations between crates] and releasing new security project, Typomania [a toolbox to check for typosquatting in package registries].
- Utilizing new tools and best practices to identify and address malicious crates.

- Helping reduce technical debt within the Rust Project, producing/contributing to security-focused documentation, and elevating security priorities for discussion within the Rust Project.... and more!

Over the Coming Months, Security Initiative Engineers Will Primarily Focus On:

- Completing all four Rust security threat models and taking action to address encompassed
threats
- Standing up additional infrastructure to support redundancy, backups, and mirroring of critical
Rust assets
- Collaborating with the Rust Project on the design and potential implementation of signing and PKI solutions for crates.io to achieve security parity with other popular ecosystems
- Continuing to create and further develop tools to support Rust ecosystem, including the crates.io admin functionality, Painter, Typomania, and Sandpit

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