From Raw Pointers to Memory Safety: A Modular Demand-Driven Typestate Analysis for Rust

Rust combines high performance with strong memory safety through strict ownership and borrowing rules. However, its unsafe mode reintroduces vulnerabilities by allowing raw-pointer manipulation, a major source of memory-safety bugs. Existing whole-program analyses for Rust often suffer from low recall and high false positives. Since unsafe code is typically small and isolated, we propose a demand-driven alternative. We present Pincer , a flow-, field-, and context-sensitive dataflow analysis framework built on IFDS. Pincer performs mutually bidirectional analysis—backward to trace raw-pointer origins and forward to explore aliases—adapting this strategy to Rust’s ownership model and low-level semantics. On this foundation, Pincer performs a modular, bottom-up vulnerability-oriented typestate analysis to detect use-after-free and double-free bugs. It tracks raw-pointer aliasing and nullness, exploits strong updates at container-manipulating returns, and leverages Rust’s safety invariants to prune provably safe regions via AXM checking. The modular design enables controlled exploration, optionally under a budget, improving scalability. Controlled unsoundness further boosts efficiency while maintaining high recall and precision. We evaluate Pincer on vulnerable programs and large Rust projects. The results show that Pincer detects memory-safety errors more accurately than state-of-the-art analyses while maintaining practical efficiency.