Discussion on Kernel Drivers and Compile-Time Safety in Rust

It has become a trope by now: "Cars are computers on wheels." In modern cars, not only the infotainment system but also the engine, brakes, and steering wheel are controlled by software. Better make sure that software is safe.

Alexandru Radovici is a Software Engineer at OxidOS, a company that builds a secure, open-source operating system for cars built on Rust and Tock. We talk about the challenges of certifying Rust code for the automotive industry and the new possibilities with Rust-based car software.

OxidOS is a Rust-based secure ecosystem for safety critical automotive ECUs. Their solution consists of a Rust-based Secure Operating System and DevTools for medium-size microcontrollers inside automotive ECUs, designed for safety-critical applications. The OxidOS ecosystem provides significant security and safety enhancements while reducing development and certification time by half for automotive ECU software development projects. This is achieved through the usage of Rust that brings benefits such as memory and thread safety enforced at compile time. The OxidOS architecture runs memory sandboxed applications, which have cryptographic credentials and are digitally signed.

Alexandru Radovici is an Associate Professor at the Politehnica University in Bucharest, Romania, where he has been using Rust to teach for a few years. Alexandru is also one of the maintainers of the Tock embedded operating system, written fully in Rust.

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