Preventing IPC-facilitated type confusion in Rust

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.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Switzer, Jennifer F.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Howard Shrobe, Hamed Okhravi, and Nathan Burow.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• 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.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/128627

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/128627