Rewrite Everything in Rust
Rewrite Everything In Rust

  Tuesday 23 February 2016
  
  I just read Dan Kaminsky's post about the glibc DNS vulnerability and its terrifying implications. Unfortunately it's just one of many, many, many critical software vulnerabilities that have made computer security a joke.
It's no secret that we have the technology to prevent most of these bugs. We have programming languages that practically guarantee important classes of bugs don't happen. The problem is that so much of our software doesn't use these languages. Until recently, there were good excuses for that; "safe" programming languages have generally been unsuitable for systems programming because they don't give you complete control over resources, and they require complex runtime support that doesn't fit in certain contexts (e.g. kernels).
Rust is changing all that. We now have a language with desirable safety properties that offers the control you need for systems programming and does not impose a runtime. Its growing community shows that people enjoy programming in Rust. Servo shows that large, complex Rust applications can perform well.
For the good of the Internet, and in fact humanity, we need to migrate our software from C/C++ to Rust (or something better) as quickly as possible. Here are some steps we need to take:

Use Rust. Using Rust instead of C/C++ makes code safer. Using Rust instead of any other language grows the Rust community, making it easier for other people to use Rust.
Rewrite code in Rust. Starting with our most critical infrastructure, rewrite C/C++ code to use Rust instead.
Extend Rust's guarantees. We can extend the classes of bugs that Rust prevents. For example, we should try to make Rust release builds check for integer overflow by default.
Verify "unsafe" Rust code. Sometimes the Rust type system is not strong enough to let you prove to the compiler that your code is safe, so you have to mark code blocks "unsafe". With tool support, you could instead generate a mathematical proof that your code is safe, checked by the compiler. (See Rustbelt.)
Make Rust implementations safer. Bugs in the compiler can invalidate the language's guarantees. We know how to build compilers that generate, along with the compiled code, a proof that the code maintains the language guarantees --- a proof that can be checked by a simple, trusted proof checker. Part of this would involve proving properties of the Rust language itself.

Of course, the language doesn't have to be Rust, but Rust is the best candidate I know of at this time.
This is a huge amount of work, but consider the enormous ongoing costs --- direct and indirect --- of the vulnerabilities that Rust would have prevented.

