Post #1887764

2026-04-29 09:56 UTC

RE: https://mastodon.social/@pid_eins/116459585811044061 Someone wrote a postmortem on the security issues uncovered in uutils, &quot;the Rust reimplementation of GNU coreutils&quot; https://corrode.dev/blog/bugs-rust-wont-catch/ It is an interesting read on its own. The author praises Rust for managing to entirely eliminate memory safety issues in uutils. My view here is unfortunately closer to that of Lennart: the remaining class of bugs are to a large part the fault of the Rust stdlib, and entirely avoidable. (see also my last blog post https://hachyderm.io/@swick/116455985982945725)

Replies (5)

@Archivist@social.linux.pizza 2026-05-04 14:26

@swick@hachyderm.io except there were cves related to memory safety in uutils as well

Open ##1958577
@alg0w@social.vivaldi.net 2026-04-29 10:14

@swick The key word is "security-minded". Everybody wants their code to become automagically safer. My maybe controversial opinion is the most Rust folks aren't security minded at all. Memory safety isn't the only thing, JS is memory safe and is used even in embedded programming ;) Also IMO most C problems come from bad and old standard library, which was designed when security wasn't a real issue. You shouldn't just use most functions in it. And as a last note if folks would've been really serious about security they would've chosen #Ada programming language.

Open ##1971043
@Qbitzerre@unbound.social 2026-04-29 10:24

@swick the allure of a panacea.

Open ##1971044
@federicomena@mstdn.mx 2026-04-30 01:12

@swick Most of these bugs smell similar to "my first file manager" kind of code. I guess everyone has to learn by screwing up :)

Open ##1971045
@zeenix@toot.cat 2026-05-01 13:51

@swick I only know one **very** specific fs API "issue" that Lennart keeps talking about and that one: 1. Is not an issue for a vast majority of software and hence why nobody thinks about it. 2. Can be easily prevented by using a crate specifically designed for it. 3. IIRC hard to abstract in a cross-platform manner. Are there other issues like that that exist "because of std"?

Open ##1971047