Rust, an emerging programming language with explosive growth, provides a robust type system that enables programmers to write memory-safe and data-race free code. To allow access to a machine's hardware and to support low-level performance optimizations, a second language, Unsafe Rust, is embedded in Rust. It contains support for operations that are difficult to statically check, such as C-style pointers for access to arbitrary memory locations and mutable global variables. When a program uses these features, the compiler is unable to statically guarantee the safety properties Rust promotes. In this work, we perform a large-scale empirical study to explore how software developers are using Unsafe Rust in real-world Rust libraries and applications. Our results indicate that software engineers use the keyword unsafe in less than 30% of Rust libraries, but more than half cannot be entirely statically checked by the Rust compiler because of Unsafe Rust hidden somewhere in a library's call chain. We conclude that although the use of the keyword unsafe is limited, the propagation of unsafeness offers a challenge to the claim of Rust as a memory-safe language. Furthermore, we recommend changes to the Rust compiler and to the central Rust repository's interface to help Rust software developers be aware of when their Rust code is unsafe.
Open-source software (OSS) is widely spread in industry, research, and government. OSS represents an effective development model because it harnesses the decentralized efforts of many developers in a way that scales. As OSS developers work independently on interdependent modules, they create a larger cohesive whole in the form of an ecosystem, leaving traces of their contributions and collaborations. Data harvested from these traces enable the study of large-scale decentralized collaborative work. We present curated data on the activity of tens of thousands of developers in the Rust ecosystem …
New programming languages (e.g., Swift, Go, Rust, etc.) are being introduced to provide a better opportunity for the developers to make software development robust and easy. At the early stage, a programming language is likely to have resource constraints that encourage the developers to seek help frequently from experienced peers active in QA sites such as Stack Overflow (SO). In this study, we have formally studied the discussions on three popular new languages introduced after the inception of SO (2008) and match those with the relevant activities in GitHub whenever appropriate. For that pu…
Programming language documentation refers to the set of technical documents that provide application developers with a description of the high-level concepts of a language. Such documentation is essential to support application developers in the effective use of a programming language. One of the challenges faced by documenters (i.e., personnel that produce documentation) is to ensure that documentation has relevant information that aligns with the concrete needs of developers. In this paper, we present an automated approach to support documenters in evaluating the differences and similarities…
Rust is a young programming language gaining increased attention from software developers since it was introduced to the world by Mozilla in 2010. In this study, we attempt to answer several research questions. Does Rust deserve such increased attention? What is there in Rust that is attracting programmers to this new language? Safety and performance were among the very first promises of Rust, as was claimed by its early developers. Is Rust a safe language with high performance? Have these claims been achieved? To answer these questions, we surveyed and analyzed recent research on Rust and res…
Rust is an emerging programing 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 paper studies the question by surveying 186 real-world bug reports collected from several origins which contain all existing Rust CVEs (common vulnerability and exposures) 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 it…
Improper Input Validation (IIV) is a software vulnerability that occurs when a system does not safely handle input data. Even though IIV is easy to detect and fix, it still commonly happens in practice. In this paper, we study to what extent developers can detect IIV and investigate underlying reasons. This knowledge is essential to better understand how to support developers in creating secure software systems. We conduct an online experiment with 146 participants, of which 105 report at least three years of professional software development experience. Our results show that the existence of …
Open source software ecosystems consist of thousands of interdependent libraries, which users can combine to great effect. Recent work has pointed out two kinds of risks in these systems: that technical problems like bugs and vulnerabilities can spread through dependency links, and that relatively few developers are responsible for maintaining even the most widely used libraries. However, a more holistic diagnosis of systemic risk in software ecosystem should consider how these social and technical sources of risk interact and amplify one another. Motivated by the observation that the same ind…
The long-standing aspiration for software reuse has made astonishing strides in the past few years. Many modern software development ecosystems now come with rich sets of publicly-available components contributed by the community. Downstream developers can leverage these upstream components, boosting their productivity. However, components evolve at their own pace. This imposes obligations on and yields benefits for downstream developers, especially since changes can be breaking, requiring additional downstream work to adapt to. Upgrading too late leaves downstream vulnerable to security issue…
The Open Source Software movement has been growing exponentially for a number of years with no signs of slowing. Driving this growth is the widespread availability of libraries and frameworks that provide many functionalities. Developers are saving time and money incorporating this functionality into their applications resulting in faster more feature-rich releases. Despite the growing success and the advantages that open source software provides, there is a dark side. Due to its community construction and largely unregulated distribution, the majority of open source software contains bugs, vu…
Structured access is an emerging paradigm for the safe deployment of artificial intelligence (AI). Instead of openly disseminating AI systems, developers facilitate controlled, arm's length interactions with their AI systems. The aim is to prevent dangerous AI capabilities from being widely accessible, whilst preserving access to AI capabilities that can be used safely. The developer must both restrict how the AI system can be used, and prevent the user from circumventing these restrictions through modification or reverse engineering of the AI system. Structured access is most effective when i…
