To accelerate the transition to memory safe programming languages, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is driving the development of TRACTOR, a programmatic code conversion vehicle.
The term stands for TRanslating All C TO Rust. It’s a DARPA project that aims to develop machine-learning tools that can automate the conversion of legacy C code into Rust.
The reason to do so is memory safety. Memory safety bugs, such buffer overflows, account for the majority of major vulnerabilities in large codebases. And DARPA’s hope is that AI models can help with the programming language translation, in order to make software more secure.
“You can go to any of the LLM websites, start chatting with one of the AI chatbots, and all you need to say is ‘here’s some C code, please translate it to safe idiomatic Rust code,’ cut, paste, and something comes out, and it’s often very good, but not always,” said Dan Wallach, DARPA program manager for TRACTOR, in a statement.
Just recently a bug was found in openssh that would let you log into the root user of any machine. With extreme skill and luck of course, but it was possible.
OpenSsh is probably one of the most safe C programs out there with the most eyes on it. Since it’s the industry standard to remotely log in into any machine.
There is no such thing as fully tested and safe C. You can only hope that you find the bug before the attacker does. Which requires constant mantainance.
The the about rust is that the code can sit there unchanged and “rust”. It’s not hard to make a program in 2019 that hasn’t needed any maintainance since then, and free of memory bugs.
Just so you know, that bug was a months long hack, probably by a State actor, not just something they didn’t spot before.
It still goes to show that there’s no fully tested C code. I’m sure OpenSSH has had the eyes of thousands of security researchers in it. Yet it still has memory-related bugs.