Microsoft wants to make Surface devices more secure and reliable through Rust

Microsoft Surface devices don't really sell in the millions in terms of units, but the company regularly refreshes its lineup. It recently revealed a Surface Laptop - Smurface Edition as well as a 50th Anniversary Surface Laptop to commemorate half a decade of the Redmond tech company's existence. Now, it wants to make its existing and upcoming Surface devices better overall by collaborating with external partners.

To that end, Microsoft has joined the Open Device Partnership (ODP), which is an initiative meant to standardize device software by enhancing security and other elements. A particular area of focus for ODP is the utilization of memory-safe programming languages like Rust, which has recently been gaining a lot of popularity. This standardization of firmware and system design helps in making devices more secure against common vulnerabilities, thereby also reducing overall engineering costs.

As a part of its ODP collaboration, Microsoft will be investing in the following technologies:

• Patina, Rust-based, UEFI-compatible firmware designed for memory safety and to address long-standing challenges in the PC firmware ecosystem.
• Secure Embedded Controller (EC) firmware,  providing a modern, security-focused embedded controller implementation designed to eliminate classes of bugs prevalent in legacy EC codebases.
• Unified OS-EC service interface, ensuring that operating systems can interact with embedded controllers in a consistent, well-defined way across devices.

This joint will bring many advantages for Surface partners and customers. Among these are better security through Rust, consistent quality due to standardization of firmware tests, faster innovation because of the modular framework, supply chain transparency, and future-readiness by flexibly adopting emerging hardware standards.

The aim of ODP and Microsoft's investment in the initiative is to facilitate the transfer of tangible benefits of firmware and hardware security and standardization to the entire ecosystem. You can find out more about the open-source initiative by heading to the dedicated website here.