RustBelt: securing the foundations of the rust programming language

RustBelt: securing the foundations of the rust programming language

Jung, Ralf (Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS))
Jourdan, Jacques-Henri (Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS))
Krebbers, R.J. (TU Delft Programming Languages)
Dreyer, Derek (Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS))

2018-01

Rust is a new systems programming language that promises to overcome the seemingly fundamental tradeoff between high-level safety guarantees and low-level control over resource management. Unfortunately, none of Rust's safety claims have been formally proven, and there is good reason to question whether they actually hold. Specifically, Rust employs a strong, ownership-based type system, but then extends the expressive power of this core type system through libraries that internally use unsafe features. In this paper, we give the first formal (and machine-checked) safety proof for a language representing a realistic subset of Rust. Our proof is extensible in the sense that, for each new Rust library that uses unsafe features, we can say what verification condition it must satisfy in order for it to be deemed a safe extension to the language. We have carried out this verification for some of the most important libraries that are used throughout the Rust ecosystem.

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:c948c5fb-5681-4963-9317-b13ad7ff98bb

https://doi.org/10.1145/3158154

2475-1421

Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, 2 (POPL), 66:1-66:34

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2018 Ralf Jung, Jacques-Henri Jourdan, R.J. Krebbers, Derek Dreyer