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Building a secure Operating System (Redox OS) with Rust (Interview)
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this post was submitted on 06 May 2024
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The biggest lie of programming these days is just because something is coded in [trendy "secure" language of the day, including Rust] means it's secure. Bullcrap. It's how you code things that make it secure or not. You can be proficient enough in C to make programs that are much more secure vs. rust. The fact that everyone makes mistakes and programming is an enormous beast to wrangle with makes things insecure and needs to be monitored and fixed.
Nope, rust is ideal for kernel code, it really is an improvement.
Writing kernel in C is like building a house with a hammer on loosen handle, there is too much give and the builder has to tap it a few times before every strike. You could say the builder knows how to build and secure a house, but hes still a human. The loosen handle adds too much difficulty result in errors which would otherwise be avoided.
Right here, is what I'm talking about. People believe that the code/language itself is inherently safe/secure or unsafe depending on what you choose and that's wrong. It's what the programmer does with that code that makes it safe or unsafe, secure or insecure. You can have the best designed and engineered materials on the planet and people are still going to be able to make things that will fall over and cause massive disasters with it. Stop bowing down to freaking Rust as if it's the damn savior of computing and programming. In the end, it's just another language and one another step removed from low level computing where it's easiest to deal with hardware-level and basic functionality systems at a huge cost.
This means there are C functions that are documented and used, but insecure.
In Rust there is simply an enforcement of certain conventions, which will make code cleaner and prevent a whole class of errors.
No one who knows anything about C uses insecure functions without having a good reason and a good foundation around them to keep them secure. The functions are there to allow C to have maximum flexibility and low-level access to a system. For the most part, these shouldn't be used, and any decent C programmer knows that. Comparing that with Rust where people think the entire language is inherently safe and has zero awareness of what they might be doing is laughably insecure is the heart of the problem.
Been programming longer than most of you have been alive, kids. Keep on defending your hacked together tricycle language and then crying when you manage to tip it over because of your overconfidence.