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Automatically Enforcing Rust Trait Properties

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Verification, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation (VMCAI 2024)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 14500))

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Abstract

As Rust’s popularity increases, the need for ensuring correctness properties of software written in Rust also increases. In recent years, much work has been done to develop tools to analyze Rust programs, including Property-Based Testing (PBT), model checking, and verification tools. However, developers still need to specify the properties that need to be analyzed and write test harnesses to perform the analysis. We observe that one kind of correctness properties that has been overlooked is correctness invariants of Rust trait implementations; for instance, implementations of the equality trait need to be reflexive, symmetric, and transitive. In this paper, we develop a fully automated tool that allows developers to analyze their implementations of a set of built-in Rust traits. We encoded the test harnesses for the correctness properties of these traits and use Kani to verify them. We evaluated our tool over six open-source Rust libraries and identified three issues in PROST!, a protocol buffer library with nearly 40 million downloads.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their feedback on our paper. This work was partially funded by the National Science Foundation via grants CNS2114148 and an Amazon Research Award, Fall 2022 CFP. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not reflect the views of Amazon.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Twain Byrnes, Yoshiki Takashima & Limin Jia

Authors
  1. Twain Byrnes
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  2. Yoshiki Takashima
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  3. Limin Jia
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Twain Byrnes .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, Saarbrücken, Germany

    Rayna Dimitrova

  2. Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

    Ori Lahav

  3. New York University, New York, NY, USA

    Sebastian Wolff

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© 2024 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

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Byrnes, T., Takashima, Y., Jia, L. (2024). Automatically Enforcing Rust Trait Properties. In: Dimitrova, R., Lahav, O., Wolff, S. (eds) Verification, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation. VMCAI 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14500. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-50521-8_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-50521-8_10

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-50520-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-50521-8

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