Rust’s recent CVE list reads almost nothing like its C‑family counterpart.
A deep dive of public vulnerability databases found 42 Rust‑related CVEs in the past year, none of which were classic buffer overflows. By contrast, C and C++ accounted for 3,217 CVEs, with over 60% labelled as out‑of‑bounds reads or writes. The study attributes the gap to Rust’s borrow checker and ownership model, which enforce strict memory lifetimes at compile time.
The distinction matters because it reshapes how teams allocate security resources. Companies can spend less on runtime fuzzing for Rust code and focus on logic errors, while legacy C code still demands heavy memory‑sanitizer pipelines. It also gives a clearer picture of where bug‑bounty programs should direct payouts.
In short, the numbers confirm what Rust advocates have long claimed: the language’s design nudges developers away from the most common memory bugs, even if it doesn’t eliminate all security concerns.