Why Memory Safety Matters for Infrastructure Security
The new CISA/NSA report paints a stark picture: critical memory-related bugs like buffer overflows and use-after-free errors contribute to a staggering 66-75% of Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) in major platforms. These aren't just statistics – they represent real vulnerabilities that attackers exploit to compromise critical systems.
Microsoft reports that "~70% of the vulnerabilities Microsoft assigns a CVE each year continue to be memory safety issues," while Google found that "around 70% of our serious security bugs are memory safety problems." When tech giants with massive security teams still struggle with memory safety at this scale, it's clear that traditional approaches aren't sufficient.
We liken memory safety and cybersecurity to concussion protocols in sports. Just as athletes became faster and stronger, amplifying the risks of brain injuries, our computing infrastructure has grown more complex and interconnected, magnifying the potential impact of memory safety vulnerabilities. The old approach of "shaking it off" is no longer tenable.
Memory Safety in Hypervisors: Why Rust Outperforms C
In our world of container and GPU workloads, the hypervisor sits at the most critical layer of the computing stack. It's the quarterback of the system – orchestrating how resources are allocated, how workloads are isolated, and how security boundaries are enforced. A vulnerability here doesn't just affect one application; it can compromise entire clusters of containers or expose sensitive GPU computations.
Traditional hypervisors like Xen, built in C, embody decades of engineering excellence. But they also inherit decades of memory safety challenges. Every buffer overflow, every use-after-free vulnerability, every memory corruption bug becomes a potential entry point for attackers seeking to escape container isolation or compromise GPU workloads.
Why We Chose Rust: Safer, Faster, and Smarter for Hypervisors
Rewriting the Xen hypervisor control plane in Rust wasn't just about eliminating memory safety vulnerabilities – though that benefit alone justified the effort. Rust's ownership model and type system caught entire classes of bugs and design missteps at compile time that would have been runtime disasters in C.
The new CISA/NSA report highlights exactly what we experienced: Android's transition to memory-safe languages saw memory safety vulnerabilities drop from 76% in 2019 to just 24% by 2024 after prioritizing Rust and Java for new code. This isn't theoretical – it's measurable impact on real-world systems.
But Rust delivered additional benefits that proved crucial for our hypervisor architecture:
High-Performance Concurrency
Container workloads need safe, parallel execution. Rust’s ownership model ensures data race–free operations at compile time, allowing us to build more aggressive optimization without sacrificing safety.
Zero-Cost Abstractions
We needed the performance characteristics of C with the safety of higher-level languages. Rust delivered both, enabling us to build abstractions that compiled down to efficient machine code.
Ecosystem Integration
The growing Rust ecosystem provided mature libraries for the networking, serialization, and async operations critical to our hypervisor design.
Strongly-Opinionated, Batteries Included Tooling
Rust (and other modern languages) provide a comprehensive and up-to-date standard library, robust dependency management, and opinionated linting and test tooling out of the box, meaning no time needed to be spent on developing, enforcing, or communicating internal standards and practices for any of the above - a batteries-included baseline many legacy systems languages simply lack.
Overcoming the Challenges of Rewriting Xen in Rust
The CISA/NSA report acknowledges what we experienced firsthand: "Existing codebases often rely on tightly coupled, non-memory safe language components. Performance overhead can arise from interlanguage communication. Many MSLs still lack comprehensive tooling and community support."
These challenges are real. Interfacing Rust code with existing Xen components required careful design of foreign function interfaces. Performance profiling revealed bottlenecks in cross-language communication that demanded creative solutions. The Rust ecosystem, while rapidly maturing, still had gaps in hypervisor-specific tooling.
But as the report notes, these challenges are "surmountable and far outweighed by the long-term benefits to system integrity." Our experience proves this assertion. The upfront investment in Rust tooling, developer training, and careful architectural design paid dividends in reduced vulnerability surface area and improved system reliability. As an added benefit, our additional client to the hypervisor ABI is a useful tool towards testing and stabilizing the Xen ABI itself.
Start With Rust, Don’t Rewrite In Rust
The new government guidance advocates for what they call "strategic MSL adoption" – a balanced approach that doesn't require complete rewrites overnight. Rather than mandating complete rewrites, the guide recommends starting with new projects and incrementally integrating memory safe languages into high-risk components, such as the “Rust for Linux” project targeted at device drivers – which are notoriously the most insecure components of the Linux Kernel itself.
This mirrors our approach exactly. We didn't attempt to rewrite every line of Xen immediately. Instead, we focused on the control plane – the high-risk, network-facing components that orchestrate container lifecycle and resource management. This strategic approach allowed us to maximize security benefits while maintaining compatibility with the broader Xen ecosystem.
Memory Safety as Competitive Advantage
"Strategic MSL adoption is an investment in a secure software future," the report concludes. For Edera, this investment has become a key differentiator in the market.
Our customers – enterprises running sensitive workloads in containers and GPU environments – increasingly understand that traditional security approaches aren't sufficient. They need isolation that they can trust at the hypervisor level, especially when dealing with AI/ML workloads that process sensitive data or run untrusted code.
By building memory safety into a critical management component of our hypervisor stack, we're not just preventing today's known attack vectors – we're building resilience against future attack techniques that exploit memory corruption vulnerabilities.
The playing field has changed, just as it did with concussion protocols in sports. Organizations that adapt their safety protocols to match the new reality will thrive. Those that don't may find themselves on the sidelines, dealing with the consequences of preventable vulnerabilities.
The time to act isn't just now – for forward-thinking organizations, it was yesterday. At Edera, we're proud to be leading the charge toward a more secure, memory-safe future. If you’re evaluating memory-safe infrastructure for container and GPU workloads, talk to us. Edera’s Rust-based hypervisor is redefining what secure container platforms can achieve.
