This is the the last of three posts on the course I regularly teach, CS 330, Organization of Programming Languages. The first two posts covered programming language styles and mathematical concepts. This post covers the last 1/4 of the course, which focuses on software security, and related to that, the programming language Rust.
This course topic might strike you as odd: Why teach security in a programming languages course? Doesn’t it belong in, well, a security course? I believe that if we are to solve our security problems, then we must build software with security in mind right from the start. To do that, all programmers need to know something about security, not just a handful of specialists. Security vulnerabilities are both enabled and prevented by various language (mis)features, and programming (anti)patterns. As such, it makes sense to introduce these concepts in a programming (languages) course, especially one that all students must take.
This post is broken into three parts: the need for security-minded programming, how we cover this topic in 330, and our presentation of Rust. The post came to be a bit longer than I’d anticipated; apologies!