Learning and programming challenges of rust

Zhu, Shuofei; Zhang, Ziyi; Qin, Boqin; Xiong, Aiping; Song, Linhai

doi:10.1145/3510003.3510164

Cited by 8 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…To reduce the vulnerabilities caused by unsafe fragments, researchers have conducted various studies, including code suggestions/specifications [15,25,26], formal verification [27][28][29], fuzzy testing [30][31][32], symbolic execution [33][34][35], and static analysis [36][37][38].…”

Section: Rust Language Safety Improvement Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Zhu et al [15] proposed six suggestions for learning and programming Rust, allowing programmers to better understand Rust's safety mechanisms and develop safer systems. Qin et al [25,26] performed the first empirical study of Rust and proposed an important concept known as Interior Unsafe.…”

Section: Rust Language Safety Improvement Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Regarding (i), we have observed that the specification-like solutions [15,25,26] introduce a lot of subjective randomness, the test-like solutions [33,37,38] all lack accuracy due to the existence of false positives and false negatives, and the formal-like solutions [27,31,34] mostly prove a subset of the language due to state explosions and heavily depend on a lot of experts' efforts. Therefore, the key idea for addressing this challenge is to balance the trade-off between test efficiency and proof complexity by minimizing the use of unsafe code as much as possible.…”

Section: Thetis Design Ideasmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Unsafe fragments are mainly used to implement five types of operations [14]: (1) dereferencing a raw pointer; (2) calling an unsafe function or method; (3) accessing or modifying a mutable static variable; (4) implementing an unsafe trait; and (5) accessing fields of a union. Previous research has verified that a program fully written in safe code can completely avoid memory errors [13,15,16]; however, the unavoidable unsafe fragments may introduce vulnerabilities and make the system less safe. Although Rust does not completely address the safety issues of system-level programming, it still offers many advantages over traditional languages such as C.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, unsafe fragments are similar to C, suffering from many memory and thread issues. Previous research shows that when checked by the compiler, programs fully written in safe code can completely avoid memory errors [15]; thus, unsafe fragments are the major reason for the reduction in the safety of OSs. Therefore, the issue of Rust safety is focused on the improvement of unsafe fragments.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Thetis: A Booster for Building Safer Systems Using the Rust Programming Language

Jiang,

Dong,

Ding

et al. 2023

Applied Sciences

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Rust is a new system-level programming language that prioritizes performance, safety, and productivity. However, as evidenced in many previous works, unsafe code fragments broadly exist in Rust projects. The use of these unsafe fragments can fundamentally violate the safety of systems developed using the programming language. In response to this problem, we propose a novel methodology (Thetis) to enhance the safety capability of Rust. The core idea of Thetis is to reduce unsafe code, encapsulate unsafe code using safety rules, and make it easier to verify unsafe code through formal means. The proposed methodology involves three main components. In the context of Rust itself, Thetis combines replacement and encapsulation for Interior Unsafe segments, minimizing unsafe fragments and reducing unsafe operations and their range. For systems developed using Rust, new ACSL formal statutes are applied to reduce the unsafe potential of the encapsulated Interior Unsafe segments, enhancing the safety of the system. Regarding the development life cycle in Rust, Thetis introduces automatic defect detection and optimization based on feature extraction, improving engineering efficiency. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Thetis by using it to fix defects in BlogOS and ArceOS. The experimental results reveal that Thetis reduces the number of unsafe operations in these OSs by 40% and 45%, respectively. The use of Miri to detect and eliminate defects in ArceOS reduces the likelihood of undefined behavior by about 50%, which effectively demonstrates that the proposed method can improve the safety of the Rust system. In addition, performance test results from LMbench show that the performance loss caused by Thetis is only 1.076%, thereby maintaining the high-performance characteristics of the Rust system.

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