“They” did not go anywhere yet. This is a proposal, nothing more. It will take serious discussions over years to get this into C++.

Prominent figures already said they prefer safety profiles as a less intrusive and more C++ approach at conferences It will be fun to watch this and the other safety proposals going forward.

Well, its a brand new standard library. A fresh start.

Read the proposal: Lifetimes annotations, the rust standard library (incl. basic types like Vec, ARc, …), first class tuples, pattern matching, destructive moves, unsafe, it is all in there.

The proposal is really to bolt on Rust to the side of C++, with all the compatibility problems that brings by necessity.

Not only that: It protects your data. The Unix security model is unfortunately stuck in the 1970s: It protects users from each other. That is a wonderful property, but in todays world you also need to protect the users from the applications they are running: Anything running as your user has access to all your data. And on most computer systems the interesting data is the one the users out there: Cryptogrqphic keys, login information, financial information, … . Typically users are much more upset to loose their data than about some virus infecting the OS files, those are trivial to fix.

Running anything as anlther user stops that application from having access to most of your data.

The same happens with any of the new immutable distributions. It’s just less effort as you do not need to do the nix configuration dance anymore.

Any of the many immutable distros (vanilla os, fedora silverblue, bluefin, aeon, endless os, pure os, …) will all obviously work.

Most of your customizations will live in your home directory anyway, so the details of the host OS do not matter too much. As long as it comes with the UI you like, you will be mostly fine. And yku said you like gnome, that installs many apps from flathub anyway and they work just fine from there.

For development work you just set up a distrobox/toolbox container and are ready to go with everything you need. I much prefer that over working on the “real system” as I can have different environments for different projects and do not have to polute my system with all kinds of dependencies that are useless to the functionality of my system.

NixOS is ofmcourse also an option and is quasi-immutable, but it is also much more complicated to manage.

I’d go for open source projects. They usually have bigger code bases and good practices, that they enforce on their contributors with code reviews and such.

It’s a good way to get feedback on your code, something miss out on personal projects and get much less of in university and corporate projects.

Rustfmt is not very configurable. That is a wonderful thing: People don’t waste time on discussing different formatting options and every bit of rust code looks pretty identical.

Why would they need to share ssh keys? Ssh will happily accept dozens of allowed keys.

When I last checked (and that is a long time ago!) it ran everywhere, but did only sandbox the application on ubuntu – while the website claimed cross distribution and secure.

That burned all the trust I had into snaps, I have not looked at them again. Flatpaks work great for me, there is no need to switch to a wannabe walled garden which may or may not work as advertised.

That depends a lot on how you define “correct C”.

It is harder to write rust code than C code that the compiler will accept. It is IMHO easier to write rust code than to write correct C code, in the sense it only uses well defined constructs defined in the C standard.

The difference is that the rust compiler is much stricter, so you need to know a lot about details in the memory model, etc. to get your code past the compiler. In C you need the same knowledge to debug the program later.

That depends on how you decide which bucket something gets thrown into.

The C++ community values things like the RAII and other features that developers can use to prevent classes of bugs. When that is you yard-stick, then C and C++ are not in one bucket.

These papers are about memory safety guarantees and not much else. C and C++ are firmly in the same bucket according to this metric. So they get grouped together in these papers.

Why don’t you download the latest release/nightly from github and unpack it somewhere?

Yeap, -O3 is mostly voodoo. Berger has some measurements.

Spoiler: He found your username has a bigger effect on performance than most compiler flags:-)

Ansible must examine the state of a system, detect that it is not in the desired state and then modify the current state to get it to the desired state. That is inheritently more complex than building a immutable system that is in the desired state by construction and can not get out of the desired state.

It’s fine as ,one as you use other people’s rules for ansible and just configure those, but it gets tricky fast when you start to write your own. Reliably discovering the state of a running system is surprisingly tricky.

The quote above covered exactly what you just said: “yet were also more likely to rate their insecure answers as secure compared to those in our control group” at work :-)

That interface is let any random app take screenshots of anything running on the same server without any way for the user to know it happens.

I am so glad that interface is gone, especially when running proprietary apps.

Plugins are a code execution vulnerability by design;-) Especially with binary plugins you can call/access/inspect everything the program itself can. All UI toolkits make heavy use of plugins, so you can not avoid those with almost all UI applications.

There are non-UI applications with similar problems though.

Running anything with network access as root is an extra risk that effects UI and non-UI applications in the same way.

Usig anything as root is a security risk.

Using any UI application as root is a bigger risk. That’s because every UI toolkit loads plugins and what not from all over the place and runs the code from those plugins (e.g. plugins installed system wide and into random places some environment variables point to). Binary plugins get executed in the context of the application running and can do change every aspect of your program. I wrote a small image plugin to debug an issue once that looked at all widgets in the UI and wrote all the contents of all text fields (even those obfuscated to show only dots in the UI) to disk whenever some image was loads. Plugins in JS or other non-native code are more limited, but UI toolkits tend to have binary plugins.

So if somebody manages to set the some env vars and gets root to run some UI application with those set (e.g. using sudo), then that attacker hit the jackpot. In fact some toolkits will not even bring up any UI when run as root to avoid this.

Running any networked UI application as root is the biggest risk. Those process untrusted data by definition with who knows what set of plugins loaded.

Ideally you run the UI as a normal user and then use sudo to run individual commands as root.

The one thing you can learn from sysv init isnthat asking devs to pitncode into their programs or into starter scripts does not work. They will not bother: Those will notmworkmcross platform.

So you need to cebtralize that task. You can either write a wrapper program that sandboxes starts applications in a sandbox or do that whereever the programs as are started anyway.

A separate sandboxing app that starts services complicates configuration: You basically need to configure two things the starter and the service. On the up-side you have the sandboxing code separate. Merging the sandboxing into the program starting the service makes configuration simple but adds moremcode into the the starter program.

So it is basically a decision on what you value more. Systemd decided to favor simpler configuration. The cost for adding the sandboxing is small anyway: It’s all Linux kernel functionality that does need a bit of configuration to get rolling, with much of that code being in the systemd-init anyway: It uses similar functionality to actually separate the processes it starts from each other to avoid getting confused by programs restarted and thusnchanging PIDs – something still a thing in many other inits.

I am convinced that making sandboxing easy does a lot formits adoption. No admin will change the entire startup configuration to add a sandboxing wrapper around the actual service. It is way more likely for them to drop in a override file with a couple of lines and without any problems when upstream changes command line options.