Security News > 2021 > April > 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.
"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."
With memory safety bugs in C and C++ constituting about 70% of Android's high severity security vulnerabilities, 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, which it began testing starting with Android 11 last year.