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The Rust type system guarantees memory safety and data-race freedom. However, to satisfy Rust's type rules, many familiar implementation patterns must be adapted substantially. These necessary adaptations complicate programming and might hinder language adoption. In this paper, we demonstrate that, in contrast to manual programming, automatic synthesis is not complicated by Rust's type system, but rather benefits in two major ways. First, a Rust synthesizer can get away with significantly simpler specifications. While in more traditional imperative languages, synthesizers often require lengthy annotations in a complex logic to describe the shape of data structures, aliasing, and potential side effects, in Rust, all this information can be inferred from the types, letting the user focus on specifying functional properties using a slight extension of Rust expressions. Second, the Rust type system reduces the search space for synthesis, which improves performance. In this work, we present the first approach to automatically synthesizing correct-by-construction programs in safe Rust. The key ingredient of our synthesis procedure is Synthetic Ownership Logic, a new program logic for deriving programs that are guaranteed to satisfy both a user-provided functional specification and, importantly, Rust's intricate type system. We implement this logic in a new tool called RusSOL. Our evaluation shows the effectiveness of RusSOL, both in terms of annotation burden and performance, in synthesizing provably correct solutions to common problems faced by new Rust developers.
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Zero-Cost Capabilities: Retrofitting Effect Safety in Rust
Over the last several years, the Rust programming language has gathered a following among software developers for its robust memory safety features. Nevertheless, it remains susceptible to potentially harmful side effects in untrusted code and is therefore vulnerable to supply chain attacks. We wish to investigate whether preventing them by retroactively enforcing side effect safety is possible. In this extended abstract, we introduce Coenobita, a Rust library that prevents undesirable side effects using capabilities without additional performance overhead. Our goal was to implement statically enforced, zero-cost, and unobtrusive capabilities. To evaluate Coenobita’s practicality and effectiveness, we conducted two case studies porting popular Rust crates walkdir and remove_dir_all to Coenobita. Porting walkdir required modifying or adding around 242 lines across three files originally containing 1800 lines total. Benchmarks were run on 46 tests provided in walkdir and their equivalents in coenobita-walkdir, demonstrating little change in runtime for most tests.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2327338
- PAR ID:
- 10523652
- Editor(s):
- Zhang, Danfeng; Krishnaswami, Neel
- Publisher / Repository:
- POPL 2024 Student Research Competition
- Date Published:
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- software capabilities type systems software supply chain security Rust
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
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- The DOI is not currently available.
