Preventing IPC-facilitated type confusion in Rust
Name
1204268766-MIT.pdf
Size
964.44 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
be1a9746da6b4c068ea086ed2569b2f1
Author(s)
Switzer, Jennifer F.
Advisor(s)
Howard Shrobe, Hamed Okhravi, and Nathan Burow.
Date Issued
2020
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
Type-safe languages undertake to prevent the type confusion vulnerabilities that arise in type-unsafe languages such as C++. One such type-safe language is Rust, which provides powerful type safety guarantees [1]. However, these guarantees are valid only for a single compilation unit. That is, they may not hold when multiple separately compiled processes communicate. In this work, we explore how type confusion vulnerabilities can still arise when multiple separately compiled, internally type-safe processes share information through inter-process communication (IPC). We propose safeIPC, a tool for eliminating IPC-facilitated type confusion in Rust. safeIPC is a Rust compiler extension that detects communications over IPC and inserts runtime checks to ensure that type safety is maintained. Programs instrumented with safeIPC throw a runtime error if the type of any data received over IPC is not equivalent to the type expected. Our analysis shows that safeIPC is effective in preventing type confusion vulnerabilities not prevented by Rust alone.
Description
Thesis: M. Eng., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, May, 2020
Cataloged from student-submitted PDF of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 55-60).
Subjects
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
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MIT theses may be protected by copyright. Please reuse MIT thesis content according to the MIT Libraries Permissions Policy, which is available through the URL provided.
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