This vulnerability, hidden within the netfilter: nf_tables component, allows local attackers to escalate their privileges and potentially deploy ransomware, which could severely disrupt enterprise systems worldwide.

      • AMoistGrandpa@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        1 day ago

        Rust is a programming language which was designed to be memory safe without any of the overhead caused by traditional memory safety techniques employed by existing languages (namely, garbage collection and reference counting). It does this by shifting the memory management from happening at runtime to happening at compile time. The compiler forces the programmer to follow certain rules to ensure that their program can be proven to be free of errors such as use-after-frees and double-frees. Because of this design philosophy, Rust is a good fit as a replacement for C, because it can do everything that C can while ensuring the programmer doesn’t make any mistakes with regard to memory management.

      • henfredemars@infosec.pub
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        8
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        2 days ago

        Yes, that’s right. You cannot have a UAF situation unless you’re using unsafe “escape hatch” tools.

          • henfredemars@infosec.pub
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            1 day ago

            I think the idea is that it’s easier to manage your resources in C++ if you write your code using RAII. Linux is mainly C, not C++, which makes resource management a little bit more manual.

            Rust however categorically tries to stop these problems from happening in an even stronger way. You can still write bad code in any language, but it’s supposed to be a lot more difficult to get memory corruption.

          • turdas@suppo.fi
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            1 day ago

            It’s not a joke. What was described above is pretty much C++'s RAII pattern, which Rust evangelists love to present as a revolutionary Rust invention. Used with smart pointers, it will help avoid use-after-frees. What it doesn’t avoid is null pointer exceptions (you can std::move a unique_ptr and still access it, it’ll just be nullptr), but those will typically “just” be a crash rather than a gaping security hole.

            That is not to say Rust doesn’t have its own innovations on top of that (notably that the compiler stringently enforces this pattern), and C++ does give you many more ways to break the rules and shoot yourself in the foot than Rust does.

            • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              3
              ·
              1 day ago

              Your second half there is the whole point.

              Being memory unsafe in C++ is can occur by accident.

              Being memory unsafe in Rust… essentiallly requires consistent intent.

              When coming up with guidelines for an emgineering procesd that can go catastrophically wrong… do you use a stricter ruleset, or a less strict one?

              That’s basically the safety argument.

              • turdas@suppo.fi
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                20 hours ago

                If you follow modern C++ best practices, memory unsafety will not happen by accident. The dodgy stuff in modern, idiomatic C++ is immediately obvious.

                • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  1
                  ·
                  18 hours ago

                  Yes but the whole point is that Rust forces you to do this.

                  Not everybody follows best practices, sometimes people who say they do, well they make mistakes.

                  I really don’t understand how this is conceptually difficult to grasp.

                  • turdas@suppo.fi
                    link
                    fedilink
                    English
                    arrow-up
                    1
                    ·
                    edit-2
                    18 hours ago

                    Rust forces you to do this until you have to use unsafe, after which it doesn’t. That is not so different from C++ guaranteeing your safety until you start using raw pointers.

                    It is not the compiler’s job to stop the programmer from shooting themselves in the foot if they want to. It’s the compiler’s job to make it clear to the programmer when they disable the safety, put their finger on the trigger and aim the gun at their foot. Modern C++ does this, and if you still inadvertedly shoot yourself in the foot in spite of the warnings, you brought it on yourself.

                    Regular old C, on the other hand, gives you a 9mm when you’re in grade 7, safety: always off.

        • dragonfly4933@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          7
          ·
          2 days ago

          This is correct, but not what most people think. For example, memory leaks could be considered bugs and it is easy to leak memory memory in safe rust on purpose.

          Memory leaks are usually not disastrous for security, mostly an issue for availability, sometimes.

          • Zangoose@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            1 day ago

            I think a lot of the confusion comes from the ambiguity of the phrase “memory leak.” Rust is designed around preventing insecure memory access (accessing out of bounds for an array, use-after-free, etc.) and devs call that a memory leak. But another form of memory leak is just not freeing up memory when its no longer needed (e.g. continuously pushing a bunch of things to a global vector and never clearing it). That is more of a fundamental program design issue that rust can’t do anything about. (and really, neither could any turing complete language)

      • just_another_person@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        arrow-down
        8
        ·
        edit-2
        2 days ago

        Improbable. Everything has bugs that surface. See my other link, or look yourself. There have been plenty of security fixes for Rust. It’s not bulletproof, just like anything else, just less likely specifically for certain memory attacks to be vectors.

        • arcterus@piefed.blahaj.zone
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          10
          arrow-down
          2
          ·
          edit-2
          2 days ago

          Everything has bugs that surface.

          This is a worthless statement. Rust is designed to help reduce the number of bugs. No one thinks Rust will completely eliminate all bugs. Your argument about fixes in the compiler or standard library or whatever applies to C as well.

          See my other link, or look yourself.

          The link you posted says nothing about Rust software having bugs, it’s about malware written in Rust exploiting bugs in other software.