Zack's Kernel News

Article from Issue 307/2026

Author(s): Zack Brown

Chronicler Zack Brown reports on isolating patch submissions by type, and quantum security.

Security Protocols in C and Rust

The Rust language continues to make ever deeper inroads into the kernel. Not too long ago, Linus Torvalds revealed his policy: No kernel maintainer or higher-up will be forced to work with Rust code, but, if they choose not to, they also will have no say in that code. Ever since then, the objections to Rust patches have tended to focus on design and implementation details, rather than on simply preferring to work in C.

One such design and implementation detail came up recently, when Alistair Francis submitted a Security Protocols and Data Model (SPDM) implementation in Rust. SPDM is a communication protocol intended to let computers verify that the devices on them are what they expect. It tries to prevent hostile hardware from inadvertently being given private data. To accomplish this, SPDM uses a tangled mess of public key cryptographic handshaking – all trying to remain behind the scenes so that anything using that connected hardware won't have to think about it.

As Alistair put it, "From the kernel's perspective SPDM is used to authenticate and attest devices. In this threat model a device is considered untrusted until it can be verified by the kernel and userspace using SPDM. As such SPDM data is untrusted data that can be malicious."

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