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Detecting Unsafe Raw Pointer Dereferencing Behavior in Rust

Zhijian HUANG, Yong Jun WANG, Jing LIU

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Summary :

The rising systems programming language Rust is fast, efficient and memory safe. However, improperly dereferencing raw pointers in Rust causes new safety problems. In this paper, we present a detailed analysis into these problems and propose a practical hybrid approach to detecting unsafe raw pointer dereferencing behaviors. Our approach employs pattern matching to identify functions that can be used to generate illegal multiple mutable references (We define them as thief function) and instruments the dereferencing operation in order to perform dynamic checking at runtime. We implement a tool named UnsafeFencer and has successfully identified 52 thief functions in 28 real-world crates*, of which 13 public functions are verified to generate multiple mutable references.

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information Vol.E101-D No.8 pp.2150-2153
Publication Date
2018/08/01
Publicized
2018/05/14
Online ISSN
1745-1361
DOI
10.1587/transinf.2018EDL8040
Type of Manuscript
LETTER
Category
Dependable Computing

Authors

Zhijian HUANG
  National University of Defense Technology
Yong Jun WANG
  National University of Defense Technology
Jing LIU
  National University of Defense Technology

Keyword