Supporting Miguel Ojeda’s Work on Rust in the Linux Kernel (Prossimo blog)

The Prossimo project has announcedthat it has contracted with Miguel Ojeda to work on Rust in the Linux kernelfor the next year. Prossimo is a new name for the memory-safetyprojects being run by the Internet Security ResearchGroup (ISRG), which is the organization behind the Let's Encrypt certificate authority(CA) project. Google provided the funds to enable Ojeda to work full-timeon the project starting back in April.

The Linux kernel is at the heart of the modern Internet, fromservers to client devices. It's on the front line for processing networkdata and other forms of input. As such, vulnerabilities in the Linux kernelcan have a wide-ranging impact, putting security and privacy for people,organizations, and devices at risk. Since it's written largely in the Clanguage, which is not memory-safe, memory safety vulnerabilities such asbuffer overflows and use-after-frees are a constant concern. By making itpossible to write parts of the Linux kernel in Rust, which is memory-safe,we can entirely eliminate memory safety vulnerabilities from certaincomponents, such as drivers.

We have previously covered anotherProssimo project, which provides funding forRustls development, as well as Ojeda's workon Rust in the kernel.