Mitigating Software Vulnerabilities at Microsoft over the Last 20+ Years
At BlueHat IL 2019, Microsoft engineer Matt Miller described how the software vulnerability landscape has evolved over the last 20+ years and the approach Microsoft has been taking to mitigate threats. Interestingly, among the major culprits of security bugs, says Miller, are memory safety issues, which account for 70% of total security bugs Microsoft has patched.
Google Researchers Say Spectre Will Haunt Us for Years
According to a paper by several Google researchers, speculative vulnerabilities currently defeat all programming-language-level means of enforcing information confidentiality. This would not be just an incidental property of how we build our systems, but rather the result of wrong mental models that led us to trade security for performance without knowing it.
Deliveroo Adopts Rust to Improve Performance in Core Service
Deliveroo reimplemented performance-critical components of their Dispatcher service in Rust, with an overall 4x performance improvement. InfoQ spoke with Deliveroo engineer Andrii Dmytrenko to learn more about the advantages they got from this rewrite and what it took to get there.
NPM Adopted Rust to Remove Performance Bottlenecks
Npm exponential growth drove the npm engineering team to switch from Node.js to Rust to handle CPU-bound tasks that were going to become a performance bottleneck. A recent white paper overviews the experience of developing the new service in Rust and running it in production for more than one year.