This is just a post about something that grinds my gears a bit more than it reasonably should: I think the habit of applying for CVEs for Rust (and Rust ecosystem libraries) is silly at best and harmful at worst. I think it muddies the waters about what a vulnerability is, and paints an overly negative picture of Rust’s security situation that can only lead people to make inaccurate evaluations when contrasting it with other languages like C/C++.…

Unsafety in Rust is often discussed in terms the primitive operations that can only be performed inside of unsafe blocks (such as dereferencing raw pointers and accessing mutable statics). I want to look at it from a different angle from these primitive operations, and instead focus on the capability to produce unsafe abstractions. The general concept of unsafe abstractions An unsafe abstraction is a new abstraction which requires the unsafe keyword to apply to some context (this is an intentionally “abstract” definition, because as we will see there are several highly divergent forms of unsafe abstraction supported in Rust).…