Sep 2026· Proceedings of the 14th Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems· 0 citations· 43 references
TL;DR
This paper identifies a common weakness in Rust-based systems: extensions, even those that may be considered “safe,” may fail to uphold the language properties on which these systems rely.
Abstract
Over the past decade, systems research has leveraged Rust to build systems that enforce valuable security and isolation guarantees over user-provided code in extensions. This paper identifies a common weakness in these Rust-based systems: extensions, even those that may be considered “safe,” may fail to uphold the language properties on which these systems rely. We present case studies where this mismatch breaks system guarantees and “safe” extensions corrupt kernel state in RedLeaf [35] and leak private data in Sesame [13]. As a path forward, we propose tooling to detect possible violations of system invariants in extension code. An early prototype static analysis tool suggests that this approach detects guarantee-breaking code with low false-positive rates.
Rust is increasingly used as a viable alternative to C and C++ for systems development. A central appeal of Rust is its “zero-cost” abstractions and, specifically, its ability to enforce safety without the overhead of garbage collection. In practice, however, only a subset of safety properties can be enforced staticall...
Soham Bagchi, Manvik Nanda, A. Burtsev· Proceedings of the 14th Work...· 0 citations
Rust has emerged as the leading system programming language, offering strong memory and type safety guarantees without compromising performance. This positions it as a compelling alternative to traditional languages like C and C++, which are susceptible to memory security bugs. However, manually transforming C to Rust...
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Capability-based architectures such as CHERI provide strong support for the architectural isolation of software components. To additionally protect against microarchitectural leakage, software can be written in a constant-time fashion. Modern processors, however, rely heavily on speculative execution, which can invalid...
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Restricting the system calls available to applications shrinks the kernel's attack surface and greatly mitigates the impact of compromised programs. Recent approaches showcase techniques to generate system call filters, however, all existing solutions require either kernel or application modifications to activate them...
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Memory safety is a dominant driver in security and systems research. Rust has become a viable alternative to C/C++ for systems programming because of its strong memory safety guarantees. However, it is not a silver bullet. Unsafe sections, foreign code, and compiler-soundness bugs still pose vulnerabilities. Compartmen...
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