In efforts to improve the detection of memory safety bugs, Google announces support for Rust code in the development of the Android<\/a> OS.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The problem is that C, C++, and Assembly languages don\u2019t provide safety guarantees. This directly affects the correctness of code in the Android platform, which in turn is a top priority for the security, stability, and quality of each Android release.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Memory safety bugs in C and C++ can be costly in that there is a great deal of effort and resources put into detecting, fixing, and mitigating this class of bugs. Memory safety bugs continue to be a top contributor of stability issues, and consistently represent about 70% of Android’s high severity security vulnerabilities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Android already supports memory-safe languages like Java and Kotlin. These languages are used for app development. For low-level tasks, engineers would need low-level programming languages like C, C++, and Rust<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rust code provides memory safety guarantees by using a combination of compile-time checks to enforce object lifetime\/ownership and runtime checks to ensure that memory accesses are valid. This safety is achieved while providing equivalent performance to C and C++.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is important to note that introducing Rust programming language does not address bugs in existing C\/C++ code. Replacing all the C and C++ code would be a monumental task. It would be more feasible to implement newer code in Rust over several years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In addition, there are toolchains and dependencies that need to be maintained, test infrastructure and tooling that must be updated, and developers that need to be trained.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“For the past 18 months we have been adding Rust support to the Android Open Source Project, and we have a few early adopter projects that we will be sharing in the coming months.” Android Team.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read the full announcement here<\/a> about the Rust code support from the official Google Security Blog.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In efforts to improve the detection of memory safety bugs, Google announces support for Rust code in the development of the Android OS. The problem is that C, C++, and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9711,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,13,27,16,18],"tags":[53,111,313,515,526,572],"yoast_head":"\n