Deploying Rust in Existing Firmware Codebases
Posted by Ivan Lozano and Dominik Maier, Android Team Android's use of safe-by-design principles drives our adoption of memory-safe languages like Rust, making exploitation of the OS increasingly difficult with every release. To provide a secure foundation, we’re extending hardening and the use of memory-safe languages to low-level firmware (including in Trusty apps). In this blog post, we'll show you how to gradually introduce Rust into your existing firmware, prioritizing new code and the most security-critical code. You'll see how easy it is to boost security with drop-in Rust replacements, and we'll even demonstrate how the Rust toolchain can handle specialized bare-metal targets. Drop-in Rust replacements for C code are not a novel idea and have been used in other cases, such as librsvg’s adoption of Rust which involved replacing…