Prossimo is pleased to announce the first stable release of sudo-rs, our Rust rewrite of the critical sudo utility.
The sudo utility is one of the most common ways for engineers to cross the privacy boundary between user and administrative accounts in the ubiquitous Linux operating system. As such, its security is of the utmost importance.
The sudo-rs project improves on the security of the original sudo by:
Using a memory safe language (Rust), as it's estimated that one out of three security bugs in the original sudo have been memory management issues
If that works for you and you are happy with it, fine. But sudo-rs seems to have a bit of a different usecase since it is intended as a drop in replacement for sudo, hence it must be able to handle the sudoers file aso. It still removes some of the never-used obscure functionality that sudo had, so it is probably a lot smaller code base than original sudo.
Other than being yet another “standard tool X clone written in Rust” project, does it actually provide any tangible value?
Does it have to?
If you’re a developer looking for a pastime working on a personal project, no. You’re free to waste your time and effort doing anything that pleases you.
Everyone else in the world only bothers with something if it provides any value at all. If a project such as this one fails to provide any value them no one will have any reason to waste their time with it, no matter how many times you rewrite it in Rust.
I’m with you. Potential memory safety is the benefit that people should care about. But, the original sudo has been around for so long that I imagine the memory safety is already pretty well hashed out. I believe that there are speed benefits to some of the random applications re-written in rust. But, I don’t see how something like sudo would have any benefit.