Ruishi Li (National University of Singapore), Bo Wang (National University of Singapore), Tianyu Li (National University of Singapore), Prateek Saxena (National University of Singapore), Ashish Kundu (Cisco Research)

Rust aims to offer full memory safety for programs, a guarantee that untamed C programs do not enjoy. How difficult is it to translate existing C code to Rust? To get a complementary view from that of automatic C to Rust translators, we report on a user study asking humans to translate real-world C programs to Rust. Our participants are able to produce safe Rust translations, whereas state-of-the-art automatic tools are not able to do so. Our analysis highlights that the high-level strategy taken by users departs significantly from those of automatic tools we study. We also find that users often choose zero-cost (static) abstractions for temporal safety, which addresses a predominant component of runtime costs in other full memory safety defenses. User-provided translations showcase a rich landscape of specialized strategies to translate the same C program in different ways to safe Rust, which future automatic translators can consider.

View More Papers

Duumviri: Detecting Trackers and Mixed Trackers with a Breakage...

He Shuang (University of Toronto), Lianying Zhao (Carleton University and University of Toronto), David Lie (University of Toronto)

Read More

Privacy Preserved Integrated Big Data Analytics Framework Using Federated...

Sarah Kaleem (Prince Sultan University, PSU) Awais Ahmad (Imam Mohammad Ibn Saud Islamic University, IMSIU), Muhammad Babar (Prince Sultan University, PSU), Goutham Reddy Alavalapati (University of Illinois, Springfield)

Read More

LADDER: Multi-Objective Backdoor Attack via Evolutionary Algorithm

Dazhuang Liu (Delft University of Technology), Yanqi Qiao (Delft University of Technology), Rui Wang (Delft University of Technology), Kaitai Liang (Delft University of Technology), Georgios Smaragdakis (Delft University of Technology)

Read More

Interventional Root Cause Analysis of Failures in Multi-Sensor Fusion...

Shuguang Wang (City University of Hong Kong), Qian Zhou (City University of Hong Kong), Kui Wu (University of Victoria), Jinghuai Deng (City University of Hong Kong), Dapeng Wu (City University of Hong Kong), Wei-Bin Lee (Information Security Center, Hon Hai Research Institute), Jianping Wang (City University of Hong Kong)

Read More