PhD Seminar • Cryptography, Security, and Privacy (CrySP) • Can Rust Safely Lower Barriers to Entry?

Tuesday, August 3, 2021 1:00 pm - 1:00 pm EDT (GMT -04:00)

Please note: This PhD seminar will be given online.

Justin Tracey, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

Supervisor: Professor Ian Goldberg

Diverse populations hold different interests in open source projects. For some projects where security is paramount, accepting code from new contributors can be risky, and therefore cause the interests of populations outside the extant developer community (or their funders) to receive less attention. Rust is a programming language that removes certain classes of security vulnerabilities, and has seen increased use in open source projects such as Mozilla Firefox and Tor. Does this imply that in these projects, newer contributors can be given greater trust to make safe contributions? To attempt to answer this question, we take a look at Mozilla's Oxidation project, to see what impact Rust has had on the learning curves for vulnerabilities in Firefox components that used to be written in C++.


To join this PhD seminar on BigBlueButton, please go to https://bbb.crysp.org/b/jus-jwg-tcf.