Rust strives to be a completely memory-safe language, and libraries written in it should also. bitvec has a strict requirement that it must have correct, safe, behavior first and foremost; performance and convenience are subordinate goals.

If you find a memory-safety violation in bitvec, please file an issue here describing what occurred, the platform on which it occurred, and either a code sample or a backtrace that I can use to find the error. In the past, I have been able to find error sources from a small sample and a description of intent and the failure.

I will work with you on all correctness errors to find the fault and write a fix in as rapid a timeframe as I am able. Once you have verified that I have resolved the fault, I will publish the fix as a new patch version on at least the minor series that observed the fault, and any others that I deem worthwhile.

Depending on the severity of the fault, I may yank affected versions from the Rust registry https://crates.io. As of this writing, bitvec 0.17.4 is the oldest unyanked version available, due to an incorrect usage of the allocator in the 0.11 through 0.17 series. I will always offer backports of a patch and support migrating to a newer series whenever a fault requires the removal of affected versions.

bitvec is a pointer-encoding library. It is at risk for vulnerabilities in its encoding and decoding of memory addresses, and its use of the memory allocator. It should be unaffected by other classes of vulnerability.

Any incorrect behavior found when operating on a bitvec data structure that has not been modified or tampered with by the user is a fault in bitvec, and should be reported. However, bitvec does not, and cannot, proäctively defend against adversarial modification of the objects it gives to users. Incorrect modification of objects later passed in to bitvec will crash your system, and this is not a bug in bitvec.

Incorrect behavior includes, but is not limited to, race conditions, memory access violations, lost writes, spurious writes, and allocator mismanagement. In general, any deviation from the behavior of the Rust standard library types that bitvec replaces is a fault in bitvec.