Schedule

This talk brings Rust to one of its most high-stakes, underrepresented domains: forensic software for anti-human trafficking work. It’s a technical case study in how to build secure, no-dependency binaries for machines that don’t tolerate failure—and how Rust’s design enables it.

Built and maintained by a solo dev who is also a trafficking survivor, this talk highlights Rust’s power to serve nontraditional teams solving real-world problems. It’s a story of both technical ingenuity and personal mission.

Interacting with foreign languages through Rust’s FFI exposes Rust to a range of potential safety issues. In this talk, we discuss why merely focusing on memory safety for FFIs is insufficient and present an approach and framework for interacting with foreign libraries from Rust while maintaining type and memory safety, and other critical invariants.

In an era where governments have the ability to eavesdrop on journalists and their sources through mass surveillance infrastructure, The Guardian developed Secure Messaging to provide a secure, anonymous, and easy-to-use initial contact mechanism. This presentation will detail how Rust language features were instrumental in building the system’s secure and performant backend services and how we made an inherently opaque system observable.