Secure Development with Rust: Benefits, Features, and Use Cases

Celebrated for its focus on safety, performance, and concurrency, Rust is increasingly being adopted for a variety of solutions. For example, you might want your team to choose Rust over common go-to choices like C and C++ because of its abilities to prevent common programming errors and ensure memory safety without a performance penalty.

As Rust developers with years of experience and successful projects, we know exactly when and how to use it. In this article, we overview the critical security features that make Rust stand out and examine when to use it — and when to consider alternatives.

This article will be useful for project leaders choosing the tech stack for their project and deciding whether they should go with Rust.

Why choose Rust for secure development

Rust is a system programming language created by Mozilla in 2010 as the next step in system programming. It focuses on code security, performance, and concurrency, and it fixes many issues native to C/C++. Rust quickly became popular among developers and was named one of the most admired languages for several years in StackOverflow’s surveys. IT giants like Microsoft, AWS, and Cloudflare build new products and rewrite existing solutions with Rust.

Even the White House advocates using memory safe development technologies, which is one of the key Rust features that helps improve software security and reliability. 

Here are some of the key benefits of using Rust:

Because of these benefits, developers often choose Rust for building critical low-level applications that must perform consistently and be well-protected. Let’s examine how Rust helps protect software from malicious attacks and coding errors.

How Rust improves software security

Compared to other system programming languages, Rust has a unique security model focused on memory safety — keeping access to the application’s memory data safe. Issues with memory safety can lead to memory leaks, unauthorized access to sensitive records, software crashes, and coding errors.

Such errors are common for any type of application. For example, the Android development team disclosed that in 2019, 76% of Android vulnerabilities were memory safety issues. In 2024, after the team switched to Rust, this number fell to 24%. The Chromium project reports that around 70% of high-severity bugs in their product are related to memory issues.

To avoid memory safety issues, Rust provides developers with the following features:

1. Ownership model. In Rust applications, a value can only have one owner, which can be any entity such as a variable, structure, or function parameter. When the owner goes out of scope (for example, if the code with the owner entity has already been executed), Rust automatically deallocates the memory it owns. Alternatively, Rust can transfer ownership to another entity.

This unique model of memory management guarantees memory safety and prevents common issues like memory leaks and dangling pointers. Ownership also eradicates the need for garbage collection mechanisms used by C, C++, and other languages and prevents human errors that are unavoidable with manual memory reallocation.

2. Fearless concurrency. When you need to share data between tasks, Rust ensures that all of these tasks can read data, but only one can change the data at any given time. Rust applies these rules at compile time with its ownership and type systems. 

Enforcing concurrency allows you to implement thread safety without requiring developers to manually track or manage data lifetimes and thread synchronization, leading to fewer runtime errors and data races.

3. Borrow checker. This feature is a core component of the Rust compiler that helps prevent issues like dangling pointers, use-after-free errors, and data races by forcing strict rules when passing references to data. This way, two parts of your application can’t simultaneously change the same data and there can be only one mutable reference or multiple immutable ones. The borrow checker ensures that memory access patterns are safe at compile time, resulting in more robust and maintainable code, especially in systems that rely on complex data sharing.

4. Error handling and limited undefined behavior. Rust’s error handling forces developers to manage errors explicitly and handle success and failure cases directly. This concept helps avoid issues caused by unhandled errors or silent failures and reduces the chance of encountering hidden bugs. To help developers manage errors, Rust uses explicit return types to mark them.

Rust also limits undefined behavior — issues where code execution leads to unpredictable results. By enforcing strict compile-time checks, Rust eliminates many sources of undefined behavior, such as invalid pointer dereferencing or buffer overflows. This ensures that the majority of your code is safe.

5. Cryptographic libraries. On top of built-in features, Rust has a rich ecosystem of third-party libraries, tools, and APIs to further improve the security of your code. Libraries like ring for cryptographic operations and RustCrypto for encryption ensure compatibility with Rust’s memory safety, maintain high code performance, and allow you to encrypt your application’s data.

Rust’s type system and memory model work seamlessly with its cryptographic libraries, ensuring that security-sensitive code is protected from memory issues and other vulnerabilities the same as the rest of the language.

Rust provides many other features to ensure an application’s security and memory safety, but it isn’t a silver bullet for vulnerabilities. We’ll examine these vulnerabilities later in this article. For now, let’s see when developers usually choose Rust.

What to develop with Rust

Thanks to its focus on reliability, stable performance, and security, Rust is typically used as a low-level substitute for C and C++. Generally speaking, you can use it to develop any software from an AI model to a video game. Companies usually choose Rust for building the following types of products:

Embedded systems. Embedded software and firmware demand precise control over hardware, limited resources, and device bandwidth. Issues like buffer overflows or dangling pointers can potentially cause system crashes or even damage the hardware. Rust’s focus on memory safety without garbage collection helps developers discover and fix such issues at compile time, leading to increased stability of the final product. Additionally, the language’s “no runtime” option ensures that Rust can run in environments with minimal resources, which is crucial for embedded systems.

System programming. Rust is created specifically to improve development of kernels, drivers, operating systems, and other solutions that work closely with hardware. It provides the same low-level access as C/C++, which is the traditional choice for system programming, but adds memory safety and thread-safe concurrency. Rust provides developers with the performance they need with significantly fewer runtime bugs, improving development speed and reliability.

Network management. Network applications often suffer from issues like data races, buffer overflows, and data loss handling, particularly in distributed environments. These issues make networks less efficient and more vulnerable to attacks. Rust eliminates such vulnerabilities, helping developers deliver high performance and safe network management systems. Rust’s concurrency model and libraries for asynchronous networking also allow for building scalable networking tools capable of processing high volumes of real-time traffic.

Web solutions. While client-side development is still dominated by high-level languages like JavaScript, Python, and Ruby, Rust is gaining popularity for web servers due to its speed and reliability. Rust’s ability to handle high-performance tasks allows servers to process more requests per second compared to languages with garbage collection.

In general, Rust is a good choice for developing any application that requires consistent and high performance and has to be well-protected. However, it’s not a silver bullet, and there are some factors that can prevent you from using Rust.

What are the challenges of Rust adoption?

Considering many of Rust’s advantages compared to other languages, it may seem like you should use it for any development project. But before locking Rust in, consider the following constraints:

• Lack of Rust development experts. Rust implements many unique mechanisms and features, which makes it hard to learn even for an experienced C/C++ developer. After learning the theory, developers have to participate in several projects to truly become Rust professionals. Because of that, getting a Rust development team for your project or training one internally requires a lot of time and investment.
• Relatively long development process. Many of Rust’s security and reliability benefits come from the many compile-time checks it enforces. Rust simply won’t compile code that violates its rules. While this results in reliable code, it also means that developers have to spend more time testing and polishing their software before release. 
• Language vulnerabilities. Though Rust provides many unique security features and improvements compared to other languages, it also has some issues. Using unsafe Rust allows developers to bypass built-in safety checks, creating a false sense of security. Rust is also prone to buffer overflow because of CVE-2018-1000810, command-injection vulnerabilities caused by CVE-2024-24576, and other issues.

How Apriorit can contribute to your Rust development

At Apriorit, we have been delivering Rust software for years, helping our clients with everything from architecture design to quality assurance and product maintenance. Recently, we delivered a Rust-based cybersecurity solution for remote access management and embedded software for a product based on Raspberry Pi. We also contribute to the Rust development community by providing tutorials and overviews of Rust capabilities.

In a time when expert Rust development services are rare, Apriorit engineers can help you:

• Quickly get a well-balanced and skilled Rust development team
• Patch skill gaps in your in-house team without a lengthy hiring process
• Figure out how your project can benefit from Rust’s strengths and mitigate its weaknesses
• Ensure the security of your product during development and after release
• Deliver protected and reliable software within your deadlines and budget expectations

Conclusion

Rust has quickly become a popular choice for security-focused development thanks to its memory safety, compile-time checks, error handling, and other features. However, its adoption comes with challenges like a steep learning curve, a limited ecosystem for certain niches, and language vulnerabilities.

At Apriorit, we understand both the opportunities and challenges of adopting Rust for security purposes. With our deep expertise in secure software development, we can help your company navigate these challenges and ensure successful implementation, delivering high-quality, secure solutions built with Rust.