Sudo-rs make me a sandwich, hold the buffer overflows

Canonical's Ubuntu 25.10 is set to make sudo-rs, a Rust-based rework of the classic sudo utility, the default – part of a push to cut memory-related security bugs and lock down core system components. When it arrives on October 9, 2025, those interacting with Ubuntu Linux software should enjoy a reduced attack surface and perhaps a bit more peace of mind about system security. Sudo is a command-line utility on Unix-like systems that allows authorized users to run commands with elevated privileges, typically as root. Its reincarnation using the Rust programming language aims to make the utility memory-safe. Memory-safe code precludes the possibility of bugs like buffer overflows and use-after-free, which represent the majority of serious software vulnerabilities. As a result, security watchdogs like the US govt's CISA, and Microsoft's Mark Russinovich, have spent the past few years urging developers to write new projects in programming languages that support memory safety guarantees (such as Rust, Go, and C#), and in some cases to rewrite existing projects. The Internet Security Research Group's Prossimo project jumpstarted these Rust rewrite efforts back in 2020. In response, we've seen efforts like sudo-rs, which has been supported by funding from AWS. The adoration of Rust, still controversial in the Linux maintainer community, has created a crisis for the stewards of C and C++, programming languages that don't offer comparable memory safety guarantees. If the C and C++ com...