# POC 2022 - Korea - Keynote 🦀
URL: https://www.msuiche.com/posts/poc-2022-korea-keynote/
Date: 2022-11-10
Author: Matt Suiche
Tags: rust
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POC is one of the top conference in Asia and has been running since 2006, and today I've had the opportunity to give the opening keynote [(Slides)](https://github.com/msuiche/slides/blob/main/2022-POC-Keynote.pdf) for [POC 2022](https://powerofcommunity.net) conference in Seoul, Korea where I discussed our favorite memory safe language: Rust - thanks again to the organizers for the invitation.
I chose to discuss Rust from a software engineering and application security point of view. The main points were:
- The current availability of high-performance memory safe languages like Rust, make it the best time in history of computer science to be (or become) a software engineer.
- Rust is a great language to learn if you are new to programming and are looking for pointers for your software engineering career. I always recommend to students who want to get into software engineering to start with Python to learn the basics of programming, and then to learn a more mature language such as Rust which can be used for production level coding.
- Rust is a great language if you are starting a new project from scratch, but if you are trying to migrate an existing code base written in C/C++ this may be more challenging to fully rewrite everything the larger your existing code base is.
- Rust allows you to focus on the logic of your code instead of wasting unnecessary time debugging (especially compared to C/C++), without sacrificing on performance.
- Memory safety bugs represent around [around 70% of security bugs (as reported by MSRC)](https://github.com/Microsoft/MSRC-Security-Research/blob/master/presentations/2019_02_BlueHatIL/2019_01%20-%20BlueHatIL%20-%20Trends%2C%20challenge%2C%20and%20shifts%20in%20software%20vulnerability%20mitigation.pdf), so having the opportunity to have safe code that compiles and works is amazing.
- There are two main avenues to make applications more secure:
- either you improve the compiler (which is the best solution for legacy code base that can't be rewritten for various reasons)
- or you actually use a safer language (a memory safe language - which is the best solution for new code base)
- Although Microsoft has been doing a great job at promoting Rust, the lack of official WDK for kernel programming is problematic and we will probably see a lot of people writing Windows Rust user-mode applications just like they would write C/C++ user-mode applications due to lack of resources (There is definitely room for improvement that could be done on that side).
[You can find the slides here. (Slides)](https://github.com/msuiche/slides/blob/main/2022-POC-Keynote.pdf)
PS: Coincidentally today, the NSA also published a Guide on "How to Protect Against Software Memory Safety Issues"
