Memory Safety Is Merely Table Stakes

Summary

The past few years has seen a massive success story for systems programming. Entire categories of bugs that used to plague systems programmers—like use-after-free, data races, and segmentation faults—have begun to completely disappear. The secret to this new reality is a set of systems programming languages chief among them Rust—whose powerful type systems are able to constructively eliminate these kind of bugs; if it compiles, then it’s correct … or at least, will not contain use-after-free or other memory safety errors. These languages are gaining widespread adoption across industry [1, 2, 3] and academia [4, 5, 6, 7] alike, and are adopted for ambitious and critical systems, such as new high-performance compute libraries, distributed storage systems, and operating systems. Despite these successes, the reality is a little more complicated. There is a great amount of software already written in other languages. And often, external constraints such as certification requirements or developer expertise force even new components to be written in other, less safe languages. Therefore, an important feature for any new systems programming language is its ability to easily and efficiently interact with existing foreign libraries. Developers building new systems can leverage existing native cryptography, mathematics, graphical, and other libraries immediately, without waiting for them to first be ported to new languages and without suffering a performance hit. They can incrementally migrate existing systems, replacing components in a legacy C/C++ codebase with safe alternatives [1]. Unfortunately, interacting with foreign code can result in subtle, but nonetheless devastating safety violations that re-introduce the very concerns many developers are trying to avoid by using type-safe languages. For example, foreign libraries may themselves include memory safety vulnerabilities, such as OpenSSL’s infamous Heartbleed bug [8]. When foreign code is invoked through a Foreign Func...