Is unsafe an Achilles' Heel? A Comprehensive Study of Safety Requirements in Unsafe Rust Programming

Mohan Cui, Shuran Sun, Hui Xu, Yangfan Zhou

Abstract

Rust is an emerging, strongly-typed programming language focusing on efficiency and memory safety. With increasing projects adopting Rust, knowing how to use Unsafe Rust is crucial for Rust security. We observed that the description of safety requirements needs to be unified in Unsafe Rust programming. Current unsafe API documents in the standard library exhibited variations, including inconsistency and insufficiency. To enhance Rust security, we suggest unsafe API documents to list systematic descriptions of safety requirements for users to follow.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{Cui-al:ICSE24,
  author    = {Mohan Cui and
               Shuran Sun and
               Hui Xu and
               Yangfan Zhou},
  title     = {Is unsafe an Achilles' Heel? A Comprehensive Study of Safety Requirements in Unsafe Rust Programming},
  booktitle = {ICSE},
  pages     = {106:1--106:13},
  publisher = {{ACM}},
  year      = {2024},
}

Is unsafe an Achilles' Heel? A Comprehensive Study of Safety Requirements in Unsafe Rust Programming

Abstract

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