Miri: Practical Undefined Behavior Detection for Rust

The Rust programming language has two faces: on the one hand, it is a high-level language with a strong type system ensuring memory and thread safety. On the other hand, Rust crucially relies on unsafe code for cases where the compiler is unable to statically ensure basic safety properties. The challenges of writing unsafe Rust are similar to those of writing C or C++: a single mistake in the program can lead to Undefined Behavior, which means the program is no longer described by the language's Abstract Machine and can go wrong in arbitrary ways, often causing security issues.

Ensuring the absence of Undefined Behavior bugs is therefore a high priority for unsafe Rust authors. In this paper we present Miri, the first tool that can find all de-facto Undefined Behavior in deterministic Rust programs. Some of the key non-trivial features of Miri include tracking of pointer provenance, validation of Rust type invariants, data-race detection, exploration of weak memory behaviors, and implementing enough basic OS APIs (such as file system access and concurrency primitives) to be able to run unchanged real-world Rust code. In an evaluation on more than 100 000 Rust libraries, Miri was able to successfully execute more than 70% of the tests across their combined test suites. Miri has found dozens of real-world bugs and has been integrated into the continuous integration of the Rust standard library and many prominent Rust libraries, preventing many more bugs from ever entering these codebases.

CCS Concepts: • Software and its engineering → Software testing and debugging; Semantics.