Rust Application Security: A Practical Guide

The book "Security of Rust Applications" is a practical guide for developers who want to master the principles of secure programming in Rust. Rust is renowned for its ownership system and borrow checker, which prevent many typical errors at the compilation stage. However, as practice shows, even in Rust there are risks: incorrect use of unsafe, memory leaks when working with external libraries (FFI), concurrency issues, and logical errors that the compiler does not catch. This book bridges the gap between "safe by default" and "truly secure" code.

Who is this book for?

• Rust developers with a basic level (knowledge of syntax and type system).
• Security engineers transitioning to Rust from C/C++.
• Software architects who need to design reliable and attack-resistant systems.
• Anyone who wants to avoid common mistakes when writing production code in Rust.

What will you learn from the book?

• Deep analysis of Rust's security system: how the borrow checker, lifetimes, Send/Sync traits work, and why they are not a panacea.
• Working with unsafe: when to use it, how to minimize risks, rules for writing safe unsafe code.
• Auditing and static analysis: tools (Clippy, Miri, cargo-audit), finding vulnerabilities in dependencies, call graph analysis.
• Security testing: property-based testing (proptest), fuzzing (cargo-fuzz), writing unit tests for critical sections.
• Protection against real attacks: buffer overflow (yes, this is also possible in Rust in unsafe), race conditions, logic bombs, memory attacks via FFI.
• Parallelism and concurrency: how to avoid deadlocks and data races, using atomics, channels, and RwLock with security in mind.
• Real-world project cases: analysis of vulnerabilities in popular Rust crates (e.g., leaks in string handling, errors in protocol implementations).

Book structure:

The material is divided into 12 chapters: from the basics (review of the ownership system) to advanced topics (formal verification using Kani, creating safe wrappers for C libraries). Each chapter contains code examples, exercises, and checklists for security verification. At the end, there is an appendix with audit report templates.

Why is this book important?

Rust is actively used in system programming, blockchain, web servers, and embedded systems. A security error can cost millions. This book will help you not just write code, but think like a security specialist, using all of Rust's capabilities to protect your application.

Author: Alexey Petrov — a security engineer with 10 years of experience, specializing in Rust for the last 5 years. He has participated in code audits for several blockchain projects and open-source libraries.