Rust-proofing the internet with ISRG's Prossimo

You know the non-profit Internet Security Research Group (ISRG) for its Let's Encrypt certificate authority, the most popular way of securing websites with TLS certificates. The group wants to do more. Its newest project, Prossimo, seeks to make many basic internet programs and protocols memory-safe by rewriting them in Rust.

Rust, like some other memory-safe programming languages such as Go and Java, prevents programmers from introducing some kinds of memory bugs. All too often memory safety bugs go hand-in-hand with security issues. Unfortunately, much of the internet's fundamental software is written in C, which is anything but memory safe.