Why PrivID Chose RUST
Why Rust is a Great Language for Cybersecurity
The tools and languages developers use to build secure systems matter more than ever. Among the many programming languages available, Rust has steadily gained a reputation as a leader in security-focused development. For PrivID, where protecting sensitive data and ensuring compliance are at the heart of our operations, Rust has become our language of choice. Here’s why and why we’ve opted to use it as the foundation for our cybersecurity platform.
1. Memory Safety Without Garbage Collection
One of Rust’s key selling points is its memory safety guarantees. A lot of security vulnerabilities, such as buffer overflows and memory leaks, come from incorrect memory handling. Traditional systems languages like C and C++ offer high performance but at the cost of manual memory management, which can introduce subtle bugs that attackers can exploit.
Rust eliminates these risks with its powerful ownership model. It ensures memory safety without the overhead of a garbage collector, which not only prevents common security vulnerabilities but also enables high performance. For PrivID, where protecting sensitive data in real time is crucial, this balance of performance and safety is invaluable.
2. Concurrency Made Safe
As systems grow more complex and multi-threaded, the risks associated with concurrency become more pronounced. Rust’s concurrency model makes it easier to write safe multi-threaded code. Its ownership and borrowing mechanisms ensure that data issues are detected earlier, preventing subtle bugs that could lead to system crashes or exploitable vulnerabilities.
For PrivID, which handles large volumes of encrypted data in real-time, this feature is critical. Secure multi-threading ensures that our encryption processes, particularly around Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP) and Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), run efficiently and safely, without introducing new vulnerabilities.
3. Speed Meets Security
While languages like Python or JavaScript have gained popularity due to ease of use, they often don’t have the performance when it comes to systems that require both speed and security. Rust, being a systems programming language, offers near-C level performance, making it ideal for developing high-performance cryptographic applications.
In PrivID’s case, speed is crucial. Our platform needs to handle large datasets, execute complex cryptographic algorithms, and ensure seamless user experiences—all without compromising on security. Rust’s ability to compile to highly optimised machine code means we can deliver both performance and safety.
4. Built-In Security Features
Rust’s development ecosystem is designed with security in mind. The language itself encourages best practices, such as immutability by default and the use of safe abstractions. Additionally, Rust’s compiler performs exhaustive checks for various issues, uninitialised memory, and null pointer dereferencing etc.. These built-in safeguards prevent a large class of security issues before they even enter the production environment.
Security is embedded in everything we do. By using Rust, we can make sure that even our development practices reflect this commitment. Rust helps us catch potential issues early in the development process, giving us confidence in the robustness of our platform.
5. Open Source and Auditable
Rust’s open-source nature is another significant advantage. Open-source software encourages community contributions, code review, and auditing, all of which are essential in building secure systems. The transparency of Rust’s development ensures that its libraries and components can be scrutinized by the wider security community.
By choosing Rust, we benefit from a rich ecosystem of vetted libraries and tools, which further enhances the security of our platform.
6. Growing Adoption and Ecosystem
Rust has seen increasing adoption across industries, particularly in security-sensitive fields. Mozilla, for instance, uses Rust to rewrite performance-critical components of Firefox, and many other companies are doing the same. Google, for example, uses Rust for better integrity. This growing ecosystem means that Rust’s libraries and tooling for cryptography, networking, and systems programming are becoming more mature and reliable.
We are constantly looking ahead, and Rust’s expanding ecosystem means we can build on a language that continues to evolve and improve. Its growing adoption gives us confidence that Rust will remain a leading choice for building secure systems for years to come.
Why PrivID Chose Rust
At PrivID, we’re not just protecting data—we’re building a platform that organisations can trust to meet the most stringent privacy and security requirements. Our decision to use Rust as our primary programming language stems from the fact that Rust enables us to deliver the highest level of security without sacrificing performance.
The core technologies we use need robust, error-free implementations. Rust’s memory safety, concurrency model, and high performance make it an ideal fit for building our systems. Additionally, Rust’s growing ecosystem ensures that we can leverage a rich set of libraries and tools to continually enhance our platform’s security and performance.
By choosing Rust, we’ve positioned PrivID at the cutting edge of cybersecurity technology, ensuring that our clients' data is protected with the best possible tools and techniques available.