Rust in the enterprise: Best practices and security considerations
5 minute read time
As Rust programming language adoption continues to grow, enterprises are beginning to integrate it into their development ecosystems.
While Rust's memory safety and performance benefits make it an attractive choice, adopting the language at an enterprise level introduces unique challenges and considerations.
The role of Rust in enterprise development
Rust is increasingly being used in enterprise environments, particularly in industries that require high security and reliability.
Its safety guarantees make it appealing for financial services, cloud infrastructure, and embedded systems.
Unlike other languages that rely on garbage collection or manual memory management, Rust provides compile-time safety checks that prevent common vulnerabilities like buffer overflows and data races.
When organizations begin to adopt Rust at scale, key considerations emerge, including:
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Security and compliance: Enterprises must ensure their security teams are equipped to understand Rust's unique properties, including the implications of using unsafe Rust code.
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Dependency management: Organizations need to assess and vet open source Rust crates to prevent security risks in the software supply chain.
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Internal tooling and support: Integrating Rust into enterprise development requires robust tooling, continuous integration support, and security monitoring.
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Developer training: Given Rust's learning curve, enterprises must invest in training programs to help teams transition effectively.
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Integration with existing systems: Rust must work alongside legacy systems and other programming languages, requiring careful interoperability planning.
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Performance optimization: While Rust provides high efficiency, fine-tuning Rust applications for enterprise workloads requires specialized expertise.
Navigating security and open source dependencies
One of the biggest challenges in enterprise Rust adoption is managing dependencies. Rust's package ecosystem, primarily hosted on crates.io, provides thousands of libraries (crates) that developers can leverage.
However, organizations must carefully evaluate these dependencies, ensuring they are actively maintained and secure.
Best practices for managing Rust dependencies include:
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Auditing crates for security risks: Enterprises can mirror Crates.io repositories internally, allowing security teams to audit third-party dependencies before they are integrated.
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Evaluating unsafe code usage: While Rust is designed for safety, certain crates rely on unsafe code to interact with low-level system operations. Security teams should be aware of how unsafe Rust is used in dependencies.
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Implementing software supply chain security tools: Utilizing tools that analyze Rust dependencies for vulnerabilities ensures software integrity throughout development and deployment.
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Standardizing approved libraries: Organizations can maintain an internal list of vetted crates to streamline development and reduce security risks.
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Monitoring and updating dependencies: Regularly reviewing and updating Rust dependencies helps mitigate the risk of security vulnerabilities in outdated libraries.
Working with security and compliance teams
Introducing Rust into an enterprise environment requires collaboration between development and security teams.
While Rust's memory safety reduces certain classes of vulnerabilities, enterprises should not assume Rust eliminates security concerns altogether.
Security teams should understand the following:
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How Rust's memory safety works: While Rust prevents many common memory errors, it still allows for unsafe operations when necessary.
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The role of security tooling: Enterprises should incorporate static analysis, code reviews, and supply chain security tools to assess the security posture of Rust applications.
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Risk mitigation for unsafe code: Code reviews should prioritize reviewing unsafe Rust blocks to ensure they do not introduce unintended vulnerabilities.
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Security training for developers: Ensuring that developers understand secure coding practices in Rust helps minimize risk and improves software quality.
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Compliance and regulatory requirements: Enterprises operating in regulated industries must ensure Rust development aligns with compliance frameworks, such as SOC 2, ISO 27001, and other security standards.
The future of Rust in the enterprise
As Rust continues to gain traction, its adoption in enterprise environments will depend on the maturity of its tooling and best practices. Companies investing in Rust must balance its security advantages with the need for robust dependency management and organizational support.
With major cloud providers and software vendors incorporating Rust into their technology stacks, the language is well-positioned to become a critical part of enterprise software development. As adoption grows, enterprises will need to develop strategies for training developers, managing supply chain risks, and ensuring security best practices are in place.
For more insights into Rust, explore our documentation or watch the full webinar on best practices. This webinar is part one of a three-part series. For deeper insights into integrating Rust into enterprise environments and security-critical applications, explore our previous posts in this series and stay tuned for future discussions.
Aaron is a technical writer on Sonatype's Marketing team. He works at a crossroads of technical writing, developer advocacy, software development, and open source. He aims to get developers and non-technical collaborators to work well together via experimentation, feedback, and iteration so they ...
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