Memory-safety challenge considered solved? An in-depth study with all Rust CVEs

摘要: Rust is an emerging programming language that aims at preventing memory-safety bugs without sacrificing much efficiency. The claimed property is very attractive to developers, and many projects start using the language. However, can Rust achieve the memory-safety promise? This article studies the question by surveying 186 real-world bug reports collected from several origins, which contain all existing Rust common vulnerability and exposures (CVEs) of memory-safety issues by 2020-12-31. We manually analyze each bug and extract their culprit patterns. Our analysis result shows that Rust can keep its promise that all memory-safety bugs require unsafe code, and many memory-safety bugs in our dataset are mild soundness issues that only leave a possibility to write memory-safety bugs without unsafe code. Furthermore, we summarize three typical categories of memory-safety bugs, including automatic …