David Weston, Microsoft vice president responsible for the security of the Windows operating system, in his report at the BlueHat IL 2023 conference, shared information on the development of Windows protection mechanisms. Among other things, the progress in using the Rust language to improve the security of the Windows kernel is mentioned. Moreover, it is stated that the code written in Rust will be added to the core of Windows 11, possibly in a few months or even weeks.
Among the main motivations for using Rust are the use of memory-safe tools and work to reduce errors in the code. The initial goal is to replace some of C++'s internal data types with equivalent types provided by Rust. In its current form, about 36 thousand lines of Rust code have been prepared for inclusion in the core. Testing the system with the new code showed no negative impact on performance in the PCMark 10 package (test of office applications), and in some microtests the new code even turned out to be faster.
The first area where Rust was introduced was the DWriteCore code that provides font parsing. Two developers were involved in the project, who spent six months on processing. The use of a new implementation rewritten in Rust increased the performance of generating glyphs for text by 5-15%. The second area of ββapplication of Rust was the implementation of the REGION data type in the Win32k GDI (Graphics Driver Interface). The GDI components rewritten in Rust are already successfully passing all tests when used on Windows, and soon they plan to include the new code by default in Windows 11 Insider test builds. Among other achievements related to Rust, the translation into this language of the implementation of individual Windows system calls is noted.
Source: opennet.ru