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"Rust doesn't check integer overflow" is one of the worst reasons I've ever heard to avoid it in favor of a non-memory-safe language. You can turn on Rust integer overflow checks with a compiler flag. You can't turn on memory safety in non-memory-safe languages.

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You could argue that compiling with asan is turning on memory safety. Sort of.

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Not at all since the only issues it finds reliably are linear overflows. It can't detect temporal safety issues when allocations are out of the quarantine and can't detect most out-of-bounds accesses but rather only special cases. It can't detect anything within objects either.

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HWAsan can detect a much broader range of issues between objects rather than only accesses outside of them, and doesn't depend as much on a quarantine but it's probabilistic and has a fairly decent chance of missing nearly any issue. Neither of these is close to memory safety.

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Hardware memory tagging on ARMv8.5 (not deployed in practice) / ARMv9 (deployed in the latest SoC generation by Qualcomm, at minimum) provides what HWAsan did via the ARM TBI (Top Byte Ignore) feature in a way that's meant to be suitable for production usage without a high cost.

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It's going to be the standard level of mitigation on Pixels and also perhaps elsewhere if Google makes enabling it mandatory for the Android 13 CDD. If they only make it recommended, a lot of vendors won't ship it because it does still have a performance cost (for malloc, etc.).

12:35 PM · Mar 30, 2022Twitter Web App