Counterexamples in Safe Rust

Explore a research presentation from PriSC 2025 that examines security vulnerabilities within safe Rust programming. Muhammad Hassnain and Caleb Stanford from the University of California, Davis demonstrate through counterexamples that Rust's safety guarantees can be compromised even when using only safe Rust code. The talk presents experimental results evaluating whether existing program analysis tools can detect these risks, if these attack patterns exist in real-world Rust libraries, and how current supply chain attacks might leverage similar vulnerabilities. The researchers provide all examples and data in an open-source GitHub repository, aiming to inspire future work on strengthening Rust's safety beyond the traditional safe/unsafe distinction and improving its resilience against sophisticated attacks. This 19-minute presentation was delivered at the PriSC 2025 workshop on January 19, 2025, sponsored by ACM SIGPLAN.