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Rust for Linux: Understanding the Security Impact of Rust in the Linux Kernel
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Rust is a young systems programming language, but it has gained tremendous popularity thanks to its assurance of memory safety. However, the performance of Rust has been less systematically understood, although many people are claiming that Rust is comparable to C/C++ regarding efficiency. In this paper, we aim to understand the performance of Rust, using C as the baseline. First, we collect a set of micro benchmarks where each program is implemented with both Rust and C. To ensure fairness, we manually validate that the Rust version and the C version implement the identical functionality using the same algorithm. Our measurement based on the micro benchmarks shows that Rust is in general slower than C, but the extent of the slowdown varies across different programs. On average, Rust brings a 1.77x “performance overhead” compared to C. Second, we dissect the root causes of the overhead and unveil that it is primarily incurred by run-time checks inserted by the compiler and restrictions enforced by the language design. With the run-time checks disabled and the restrictions loosened, Rust presents a performance indistinguishable from C.more » « less
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The Rust programming language is a prominent candidate for a C and C++ replacement in the memory-safe era. However, Rust’s safety guarantees do not in general extend to arbitrary third-party code. The main purpose of this short paper is to point out that this is true even entirely within safe Rust – which we illustrate through a series of counterexamples. To complement our examples, we present initial experimental results to investigate: do existing program analysis and program veri!cation tools detect or mitigate these risks? Are these attack patterns realizable via input to publicly exposed functions in real-world Rust libraries? And to what extent do existing supply chain attacks in Rust leverage similar attacks? All of our examples and associated data are available as an open source repository on GitHub. We hope this paper will inspire future work on rethinking safety in Rust – especially, to go beyond the safe/unsafe distinction and harden Rust against a stronger threat model of attacks that can be used in the wild.more » « less
