Counterexamples in Safe Rust
Muhammad Hassnain, and Caleb Stanford
In Proceedings of the 39th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering Workshops, Sacramento, CA, USA, Jul 2024
The Rust programming language is a prominent candidate for a C and C++ replacement in the memory-safe era. However, Rust’s safety guarantees do not in general extend to arbitrary third-party code. The main purpose of this short paper is to point out that this is true even entirely within safe Rust - which we illustrate through a series of counterexamples. To complement our examples, we present initial experimental results to investigate: do existing program analysis and program verification tools detect or mitigate these risks? Are these attack patterns realizable via input to publicly exposed functions in real-world Rust libraries? And to what extent do existing supply chain attacks in Rust leverage similar attacks? All of our examples and associated data are available as an open source repository on GitHub. We hope this paper will inspire future work on rethinking safety in Rust - especially, to go beyond the safe/unsafe distinction and harden Rust against a stronger threat model of attacks that can be used in the wild.
