The Rust Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting and sustaining the Rust programming language, has announced it is establishing a dedicated security team.

The new team is being underwritten with support from the OpenSSF's Alpha-Omega Initiative, which partners with open source software projects and maintainers to improve the global software supply chain security, and Rust Foundation's newest Platinum member JFrog.

Explaining the need for the new team, Bec Rumbul, Executive Director at the Rust Foundation, said that because Rust ensures memory safety there's often a misconception that it's completely secure, but that Rust can be vulnerable just like any other language and it warrants proactive measures to protect and sustain it and the community.

The support from Alpha-Omega and JFrog include dedicated staff resources that the Rust Foundation will use to create and implement security best practices. Rumbul said that the first initiative for the new Security Team will be to undertake a security audit and threat modeling exercises to identify "how security can be economically maintained going forward".

The team will look beyond the central Rust language to the wider ecosystem, including Cargo and Crates.io, and will be a resource for the maintainer community.

Part of the ten point plan for open source security created earlier in the year by the Open Source Software Foundation was the recommendation that changing to use memory-safe languages such as Rust and Go would eliminate the root causes of many vulnerabilities. As part of this initiative, the OpenSSF's Alpha-Omega Initiative has made a grant to the Rust Foundation to support a dedicated security engineer. Alpha-Omega is funded by Google and Microsoft with a mission of direct engagement to improve the security of OSS projects.

More Information

Alpha-Omega Project

Rust Foundation Website

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