Keynote: RustBelt: Securing the Foundations of the Rust Programming Language (bobkonf2022)

The Rust systems programming language promises to overcome the seemingly fundamental tradeoff in language design between high-level safety guarantees and low-level control over resource management. Unfortunately, none of Rust’s safety claims have been formally proven, and there is good reason to question whether they actually hold. Specifically, Rust employs a strong, ownership-based type system, but then extends the expressive power of this core type system through libraries that internally use unsafe features. In this talk, I will present RustBelt, the first formal (and machine-checked) safety proof for a language representing a realistic subset of Rust. Our proof is extensible in the sense that, for each new Rust library that uses unsafe features, we can say what verification condition it must satisfy in order for it to be deemed a safe extension to the language. We have carried out this verification for some of the most important libraries that are used throughout the Rust ecosystem. The secret weapon that makes RustBelt possible is the Iris framework for higher-order concurrent separation logic in Coq. The talk will not assume any prior familiarity with concurrent separation logic or Rust. about this event: https://bobkonf.de/2022/dreyer.html