Comprehensiveness, Automation and Lifecycle: A New Perspective for Rust Security

Abstract

Rust is an emerging programming language designed for secure system programming that provides both security guarantees and runtime efficiency and has been increasingly used to build software infrastructures such as OS kernels, web browsers, databases, and blockchains. To support arbitrary low-level programming and to provide more flexibility, Rust introduced the unsafe feature, which may lead to security issues such as memory or concurrency vulnerabilities. Although there have been a significant number of studies on Rust security utilizing diverse techniques such as program analysis, fuzzing, privilege separation, and formal verification, existing studies suffer from three problems: 1) they only partially solve specific security issues but lack comprehensiveness; 2) most of them require manual interventions or annotations thus are not automated; and 3) they only cover a specific phase instead of the full lifecycle.In this perspective paper, we first survey current research progress on Rust security from 5 aspects, namely, empirical studies, vulnerability prevention, vulnerability detection, vulnerability rectification, and formal verification, and note the limitations of current studies. Then, we point out key challenges for Rust security. Finally, we offer our vision of a Rust security infrastructure guided by three principles: Comprehensiveness, Automation, and Lifecycle (CAL). Our work intends to promote the Rust security studies by proposing new research challenges and future research directions.