Friend or Foe Inside? Exploring In-Process Isolation to Maintain Memory Safety for Unsafe Rust

Abstract

Rust is a popular memory-safe systems programming language. In order to interact with hardware or call into non-Rust libraries, Rust provides unsafe language features that shift responsibility for ensuring memory safety to the developer. Failing to do so, may lead to memory-safety violations in unsafe code which can violate safety of the entire application. In this work we explore in-process isolation with Memory Protection Keys as a mechanism to shield safe program sections from safety violations that may happen in unsafe sections. Our approach is easy to use and comprehensive as it prevents heap and stack-based violations. We further compare process-based and inprocess isolation mechanisms and the necessary requirements for data serialization, communication, and context switching. Our results show that in-process isolation can be effective and efficient, permits for a high degree of automation, and also enables a notion of application rewinding where the safe program section may detect and safely handle violations in unsafe code.