Marc

Blog posts and open-source work

About

Marc

  • Software engineer
  • marc@tweedegolf.com

Marc has heaps of experience in machine coding, C, C++ and more recently, Rust. He is interested in software verification and his main focus is using artificial intelligence to perform proofs. He is also tenacious. Once a course of action has been chosen, Marc is the one to sort out the details, dot the i's and cross the t's.

It makes sense then that Marc is mostly working on secure systems programming; for example, he is part of the team working on sudo-rs, a re-implementation of sudo/su in Rust.

In the past, Marc has worked as a teacher and researcher at Radboud University - Computing Science, of course, teaching courses like 'Software Analysis', writing articles like ´Efficient Verification of Optimized Code´. He was also part of the University's Security Group. He now continues to share his expertise on the Rust 101 project.

In his spare time, Marc is often inspired by the non-digital world, particularly history and analogue photography.

Thanks to funding from NLNet and ISRG, the sudo-rs team was able to request an audit from Radically Open Security (ROS). In this post, we'll share the findings of the audit and our response to those findings.

At Tweede golf we are convinced that if software is written in Rust, it will be more robust (compared to legacy languages such as C, C++ or Java), and more efficient (compared to code written in PHP or Python and again, Java).

In order to get more robust software out there, we have to get Rust code running on computers of people who are not themselves Rust developers.

For some time, we have been quietly laying the groundwork for a new implementation of sudo in Rust. Now we are excited to talk about it!

Open-source work

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sudo-rs

Sudo-rs is a memory safe implementation of sudo and su, a project by Prossimo jointly implemented by Ferrous Systems and Tweede golf.

Read more in this blog post.

ntpd-rs

ntpd-rs is an open-source implementation of the Network Time Protocol completely written in Rust, with a focus on exposing a minimal attack surface. This video explains how ntpd-rs brings NTP into the modern era.

The project was initially funded by ISRG's Prossimo, as part of their mission to achieve memory safety for the Internet's most critical infrastructure. The NTP initiative page on Prossimo's website tells the story.

ntpd-rs is part of Project Pendulum. In July of 2023 the Sovereign Tech Fund invested in Pendulum, securing development and maintenance in 2023, and maintenance and adoption work in 2024.

Tags

Languages

Rust 101

Rust 101 is a university course for computer science students, introducing the Rust Programming Language, and is available for anyone who wants to teach Rust.

Have a look at our blog post introducing the course.