DeRust

Overview

DeRust is a static analysis tool for detecting type confusion bugs in Rust programs. It operates as a Rust compiler plugin that performs dataflow analysis on MIR and HIR to identify unsafe type conversions leading to three categories of bugs:

• Out-of-bound memory access
• Data corruption
• Dangling pointers

Setup

Requirements

• Rust nightly-2023-11-24 (automatically configured via rust-toolchain.toml)
• Operating System: Linux, macOS

Setup and Build

# Install the required Rust toolchain
rustup install nightly-2023-11-24
rustup component add rustc-dev rustc-src llvm-tools --toolchain nightly-2023-11-24

# Build and install DeRust
./install-release.sh

Usage

# Analyze a crate
cargo derust

# With verbose logging
cargo derust -v
cargo derust -vv

Publication

You can find more details in our ICSE 2026 paper: Rusted Types: Static Detection of Rust Type Confusion Bugs

The formalization of DeRust is available at formal.pdf.

@inproceedings{icse26:derust,
  title     = {Rusted Types: Static Detection of Rust Type Confusion Bugs},
  author    = {Zhuang, Zeyang and Meng, Wei and Lyu, Michael R.},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 48th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)},
  year      = {2026}
}

Contacts

• Zeyang Zhuang (zyzhuang22@cse.cuhk.edu.hk)