Why Rust for embedded systems security development? A security guy's perspective

By Nihal Pasham of Bosch TOP97
Time: 11:30 Room: S6

Abstract

The general consensus amongst systems programmers (and by extension embedded systems developers) has been that you can either have fine-grained system control or performance or safety (or some combination of 2 of these 3) but you can’t have all three. Rust is the first mainstream (i.e. popular) programming language to provide programmers the ability to write code without this compromise via its novel ownership and borrowing concept. Rust’s ownership and borrowing model coupled with the fact that we do not require a garbage collector for memory management has pushed Rust’s adoption into domains that were exclusively dominated by languages such as C/C++. This talk will focus on what Rust has to offer to an embedded systems security software engineer - safety by construction, zero-cost abstractions, no hidden states, powerful compile-time checks. These features have allowed us to build demonstrators with sizeable benefits such as better performance/watt, smaller code-sizes and lower code complexity with a significantly higher bar on safety and security. As an example, we have an open-source project called rustBoot - a prototype standalone bootloader, written entirely in Rust, designed to run on anything from a microcontroller to a system on chip.

Biography

Nihal is a systems security architect with Bosch. He specializes in automotive, industrial and enterprise systems security. He has been a part of the ‘connected devices’ industry for over 13+ years, researched and integrated security solutions for Fortune’s top 50 in APJ and India and provides technical leadership in the following areas - IoT (sensor/edge/gateway) security, Connected Systems Security, DDoS mitigation, Embedded high assurance computing.