Mastodawn

This reminds of the front rust is per se secure that gave us the sudo-rs disaster. The Anti-AI front war cry is ai is per se bad.

I’m tired of choosing sides and fighting battles that aren’t really mine. To me, categorical stances smell like virtue signaling. And I want no part of it.

#ai #rust #ubuntu #virtuesignalling

RE: https://toot.pouyan.net/objects/f714955d-d031-4895-bc5c-30493a887b60

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Kornel Mar 14

@i You're exaggerating with "disaster". CVE-2025-64170 was a UI issue exploitable only under rare circumstances and required ability to see victim's terminal.

Meanwhile OG sudo had more severe issues: https://www.sudo.ws/security/advisories/

so sudo-rs is an improvement overall.

Security Advisories

Sudo

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پویان Pouyan Mar 14

@kornel I’ve got no issues with rust replacing existing tools. I have a problem with claiming that it would be then more secure by default because it’s written in rust.

P.S. Irrelevant to my original point: give sudo-rs a couple of more years, and it’ll accumulate some more CVEs.

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Kornel Mar 15

@i there are numerous ways in which programming languages affect security and reliability of programs, in a systemic way.
The range of possibilities is the same for all turing-complete languages (you can make a perfectly secure program in theory, and you can ruin any foolproof safety feature with a sufficiently advanced fool), but the distribution of outcomes isn't the same.
So as a bayesian prior, I think such claim is valid. There's a decade of track record for it.

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پویان Pouyan Mar 15

@kornel Rust helps avoiding memory safety issues (which comprise a lot of registered CVEs). But it does not automagically produce “safe” and “secure” code. People make mistakes, and then some more.

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Kornel

@i You seem to apply a strict definition of "safe"/"secure" meaning nothing counts below absolute perfection, which is more of an argument about linguistic/semantics of the wording used, rather than the technical benefits of the language.
Rust has features that broadly improve quality and reliability too, eg. sum types help catch mistakes in stateful data and missed error handling. They're incremental improvements rather well-defined guarantees like borrow checking, but still helpful in practice