Android to Support Rust Programming Language to Prevent Memory Flaws

Google on Tuesday announced that its open source version of the
Android operating system will add support for Rust programming
language in a bid to prevent memory safety bugs.

To that end, the company has been building parts of the Android
Open Source Project (AOSP) with Rust for the past 18 months, with
plans in the pipeline to scale this initiative to cover more
aspects of the operating system.

“Managed languages like Java and Kotlin are the best option for
Android app development,” Google said^[1]. “The Android OS uses
Java extensively, effectively protecting large portions of the
Android platform from memory bugs. Unfortunately, for the lower
layers of the OS, Java and Kotlin are not an option.”

Stating that code written in C and C++ languages requires robust
isolation when parsing untrustworthy input, Google said the
technique of containing such code within a tightly constrained and
unprivileged sandbox can be expensive, causing latency issues and
additional memory usage.

With memory safety bugs in C and C++ constituting about 70% of Android’s high severity security
vulnerabilities^[2], the idea is to switch
to a memory-safe language like Rust and prevent them from happening
in the first place.

“Rust provides memory safety guarantees by using a combination
of compile-time checks to enforce object lifetime/ownership and
runtime checks to ensure that memory accesses are valid,” Google
noted.

Despite the obvious benefits, Google doesn’t intend to rewrite
all of its existing C and C++ code in the underlying OS, instead
focusing its memory-safe language efforts on new or recently
modified code that have a higher likelihood of memory bugs.

Some of Google’s ongoing efforts with Rust include a complete
rewrite of Android’s Bluetooth stack, dubbed Gabeldorsche^[3], which it began testing
starting with Android 11 last year. Also in the works is a
Rust-based network stack^[4]
for its open-source Fuchsia^[5]
operating system.