Security policy

Reporting

Safety is one of the core principles of Rust, and to that end, we would like to ensure that Rust has a secure implementation. Thank you for taking the time to responsibly disclose any issues you find.

All security bugs in the Rust distribution should be reported by email to security@rust-lang.org. This list is delivered to a small security team. Your email will be acknowledged within 24 hours, and you’ll receive a more detailed response to your email within 48 hours indicating the next steps in handling your report. If you would like, you can encrypt your report using our public key. This key is also On MIT’s keyserver and reproduced below.

This email address receives a large amount of spam, so be sure to use a descriptive subject line to avoid having your report be missed. After the initial reply to your report, the security team will endeavor to keep you informed of the progress being made towards a fix and full announcement. As recommended by RFPolicy, these updates will be sent at least every five days. In reality, this is more likely to be every 24-48 hours.

If you have not received a reply to your email within 48 hours, or have not heard from the security team for the past five days, there are a few steps you can take (in order):

Contact both the security coordinators directly:
- Josh Stone
- Pietro Albini
Post on the internals forums

Please note that the discussion forums are public areas. When escalating in these venues, please do not discuss your issue. Simply say that you’re trying to get a hold of someone from the security team.

email security@rust-lang.org

Disclosure policy

The Rust project has a 5 step disclosure process.

The security report is received and is assigned a primary handler. This person will coordinate the fix and release process.
The problem is confirmed and a list of all affected versions is determined.
Code is audited to find any potential similar problems.
Fixes are prepared for all releases which are still under maintenance. These fixes are not committed to the public repository but rather held locally pending the announcement.
On the embargo date, the Rust security mailing list is sent a copy of the announcement. The changes are pushed to the public repository and new builds are deployed to rust-lang.org. Within 6 hours of the mailing list being notified, a copy of the advisory will be published on the Rust blog.

This process can take some time, especially when coordination is required with maintainers of other projects. Every effort will be made to handle the bug in as timely a manner as possible, however it’s important that we follow the release process above to ensure that the disclosure is handled in a consistent manner.

Receiving security updates

The best way to receive all the security announcements is to subscribe to the Rust security announcements mailing list (alternatively by sending an email to rustlang-security-announcements+subscribe@googlegroups.com). The mailing list is very low traffic, and it receives the public notifications the moment the embargo is lifted.

We will announce vulnerabilities 72 hours before the embargo is lifted to distros@openwall, so that Linux distributions can update their packages.

Plaintext PGP key