I see the logic, but I don't think anyone is saying using Rust would make it bug free, people are just correctly pointing out Rust would have helped this bug, or in other words there is the potential for less bugs with Rust.
So yes, and.
There are at least 3 bad practices here:
- releasing of untested SW/config files
- bypassing of final users' rollout policies
- unconditional faith of final users in crowdstrike
> Now, SRE 101 (or DevOps or whatever you want to call it) says that configuration changes must be staged for slow and controlled deployment, and validated at every step. Those changes should first be validated in a very small scale before being pushed to the world later on, and every push should be incremental.
Unfortunately, the article is sort of burying the lede until half-way through until it makes some decent points.
We should be using safer languages, but also 1) how is it possible that CrowdStrike can push a content update globally to all clients with no option for their customers to delay it for testing and 2) why doesn't CrowdStrike have internal testing before deployment?
So would a unit test or a fuzzer. But it's obvious this does not solve the actual problem, only a particular instance of it. It should be as obvious that mentioning Rust doesn't too. Kernel module in Rust may not have buffer overflow bugs (even that is not 100% certain, but let's assume for a minute) but it doesn't mean it's safe - or even significantly less unsafe.