Rust will save Linux from Artificial Intelligence

In Rust Week conference, the world's largest Rust conference, in Utrecht, Netherlands, Linux stable kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman began by saying: "I'm here to talk to you about untrusted data and Linux, and how Rust will save us“. After “a month or two on the kernel security list I will make an even bolder statement and say, “You will save Linux.” “Sorry, it all depends on you.”

What he was talking about was the sudden flood of serious security vulnerabilities discovered in Linux, such as Dirty Frag , Copy Fail , and Fragnesia, which have emerged thanks to the latest AI bug-detecting programs.

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As a result, Kroah-Hartman, who has “seen every kernel security bug that has ever existed” since 2005, said the kernel team is now issuing “13 CVEs a day, or something like that, crazy.” He believes Rust is one of the few realistic ways to reduce the category of bugs that come from the traditional C error-handling and resource-management pitfalls.

Kroah-Hartman cited pitfalls with real C bugs in the kernel, including a 15-year-old Bluetooth bug and a Xen bug where we “forgot to unlock” in an error path. “The majority of bugs in the kernel are these tiny, insignificant things,” he explained.

“Error conditions are unchecked, locks are forgotten, memory leaks occur, and vulnerabilities accumulate over time and bring down the kernel. This is what we live in C. That's why we don't like it.”

Kroah-Hartman argues that the “beauty of Rust” is identifying these errors at the time of writing the code, rather than during review.

For example, regarding locking, he said: “The only way to access internal structure pointers is by grabbing that lock and releasing the lock automatically. The compiler does it, the lock happens, and everything is fine. You just can’t write code to access those values…. The compiler won’t let you.”

These properties, he argued, immediately remove a huge portion of bugs: “This will save us from these two things. First, 60% of the bugs in the kernel will disappear. Thank you.”

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Although the press releases will range from very select to rare, I said I'd pass...because sometimes the editors hide.