rust-security

Rust Security

Purpose

Guide agents through Rust security practices: dependency auditing with cargo-audit, policy enforcement with cargo-deny, RUSTSEC advisory database, memory-safe patterns for FFI, and combining fuzzing with Miri for security review.

Triggers

• "How do I check my Rust dependencies for CVEs?"
• "How do I use cargo-audit?"
• "How do I enforce dependency policies in CI?"
• "What's the RUSTSEC advisory database?"
• "How do I write memory-safe FFI in Rust?"
• "How do I fuzz-test my Rust library for security bugs?"

Workflow

1. cargo-audit — vulnerability scanning

# Install
cargo install cargo-audit --locked

# Scan current project
cargo audit

# Full output including ignored
cargo audit --deny warnings

# Audit the lockfile (CI-friendly)
cargo audit --file Cargo.lock

# JSON output for CI integration
cargo audit --json | jq '.vulnerabilities.list[].advisory.id'

Output format:

error[RUSTSEC-2023-0052]: Vulnerability in `vm-superio`
    Severity: low
       Title: MMIO Register Misuse
    Solution: upgrade to `>= 0.7.0`

2. cargo-deny — policy enforcement

cargo-deny goes beyond audit: it enforces license policies, bans specific crates, checks source origins, and validates duplicate dependency versions.

cargo install cargo-deny --locked

# Initialize deny.toml
cargo deny init

# Run all checks
cargo deny check

# Run specific check
cargo deny check advisories
cargo deny check licenses
cargo deny check bans
cargo deny check sources

deny.toml configuration:

[advisories]
vulnerability = "deny"      # Deny known vulnerabilities
unmaintained = "warn"       # Warn on unmaintained crates
yanked = "deny"             # Deny yanked versions

# Ignore specific advisories
ignore = [
    "RUSTSEC-2021-0145",    # known false positive for our usage
]

[licenses]
unlicensed = "deny"
allow = [
    "MIT", "Apache-2.0", "Apache-2.0 WITH LLVM-exception",
    "BSD-2-Clause", "BSD-3-Clause", "ISC", "Unicode-DFS-2016",
]
# Deny GPL for proprietary projects
deny = ["GPL-2.0", "GPL-3.0"]

[bans]
multiple-versions = "warn"  # Warn if same crate appears twice
wildcards = "deny"          # Deny wildcard dependencies

[[bans.deny]]
name = "openssl"            # Force rustls instead
wrappers = ["reqwest"]      # Allow if only required by these

[sources]
unknown-registry = "deny"
unknown-git = "deny"
allow-git = [
    "https://github.com/my-org/private-crate",
]