Privacy Issue in Rust [Jim's Blog]

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====== Privacy Issue in Rust ======

<wrap lo>Saturday April 3, 2021</wrap>

An article on bleepingcomputer.com brings attention to a privacy concern raised about Rust several years ago:

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In early 2017, a Rust developer filed an issue on the Rust lang’s GitHub asking, “How can I stop rustc [from] including system specific information such as absolute file paths of the source it’s compiled from in the binaries it generates?”

The developer shared some examples of paths retained in their production builds…
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It seems that Rust was (and is) embedding full local path information for files on the developer’s machine. The issue occurs in debug and production builds. The behavior isn’t documented, and there’s no way to stop the leakage.

As Rust has grown in popularity, the issue has gained more visibility, and it looks like the Rust development team is finally taking it seriously. Details in the article [[https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/most-loved-programming-language-rust-sparks-privacy-concerns/|here]].