Understanding and Detecting Real-World Safety Issues in Rust
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering(2024)
In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive, empirical study of Rust safety issues by close, manual inspection of 70 memory bugs, 100 concurrency bugs, and 110 programming errors leading to unexpected execution panics from five open-source Rust projects, five widely-used Rust libraries, and two online security databases. Our study answers three important questions: what memory-safety issues real Rust programs have, what concurrency bugs Rust programmers make, and how unexpected panics in Rust programs are caused. Our study reveals interesting real-world Rust program behaviors and highlights new issues made by Rust programmers. Building upon the findings of our study, we design and implement five static detectors. After being applied to the studied Rust programs and another 12 selected Rust projects, our checkers pinpoint 96 previously unknown bugs and report a negligible number of false positives, confirming their effectiveness and the value of our empirical study.