Name: Detecting Borrow and Provenance Bugs Across Unsafe Rust and C/C++ Interoperability
Start: 2026-09-09T11:55:00-0400
End: 2026-09-09T12:35:00-0400

Detecting Borrow and Provenance Bugs Across Unsafe Rust and C/C++ Interoperability

Wednesday September 9, 2026 11:55 - 12:35 EDT

Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Rust’s ownership system eliminates many memory errors at compile time, yet real-world systems routinely bypass these guarantees through unsafe code, raw pointers, and foreign interfaces to C/C++. In these contexts, failures often stem not from simple memory faults but from violations of Rust’s semantic aliasing and provenance rules, which may remain invisible to conventional debugging methods.

This talk demonstrates practical techniques for diagnosing such violations across unsafe Rust and cross-language boundaries. It contrasts byte-level memory instrumentation that detects spatial and temporal errors with semantic execution methods that track pointer provenance, initialization state, and language invariants. It further presents ownership-aware instrumentation strategies that selectively monitor high-risk pointers using lifetime information, reducing overhead while preserving detection capability. Finally, it shows how dynamic provenance tracking can enforce borrow permissions during execution, exposing aliasing violations introduced by foreign code.

The talk concludes with guidance on choosing appropriate methodologies based on precision, performance, and deployability in production systems.

Speakers

Joannah Nanjekye

Researcher, Canergie Mellon University

Joannah Nanjekye is a programming languages researcher/ special faculty at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research spans programming language design, optimization and garbage collection. She is the author of the book, Python 2 and 3 Compatibility, published by Apress, but has also... Read More →

Wednesday September 9, 2026 11:55 - 12:35 EDT
Palais des Congrès de Montréal

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