X-Git-Url: https://git.ralfj.de/web.git/blobdiff_plain/a77f1777f71f56db4df986b85d1b9f6955feb947..ff279676c168508b0d9eb7a0b31e9b7d93713863:/personal/_posts/2022-04-11-provenance-exposed.md diff --git a/personal/_posts/2022-04-11-provenance-exposed.md b/personal/_posts/2022-04-11-provenance-exposed.md index e5560e2..6d0d7d3 100644 --- a/personal/_posts/2022-04-11-provenance-exposed.md +++ b/personal/_posts/2022-04-11-provenance-exposed.md @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@ --- title: "Pointers Are Complicated III, or: Pointer-integer casts exposed" -categories: rust research +categories: rust research programming license: CC BY-SA 4.0 license-url: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ reddit: /rust/comments/u1bbqn/pointers_are_complicated_iii_or_pointerinteger/ @@ -277,13 +277,21 @@ Because of that, I think we should move towards discouraging, deprecating, or ev That means a cast is the only legal way to turn a pointer into an integer, and after the discussion above we got our casts covered. A [first careful step](https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/95547) has recently been taken on this journey; the `mem::transmute` documentation now cautions against using this function to turn pointers into integers. +**Update (2022-09-14):** After a lot more discussion, the current model pursued by the Unsafe Code Guidelines WG is to say that pointer-to-integer transmutation is permitted, but just strips provenance without exposing it. +That means the program with the casts replaced by transmutation is UB, because the `ptr` it ends up dereferencing has invalid provenance. +However, the transmutation itself is not UB. +Basically, pointer-to-integer transmutation is equivalent to [the `addr` method](https://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/std/primitive.pointer.html#method.addr), with all its caveats -- in particular, transmuting a pointer to an integer and back is like calling `addr` and then calling [`ptr::invalid`](https://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/std/ptr/fn.invalid.html). +That is a *lossy* round-trip: it loses provenance information, making the resulting pointer invalid to dereference. +It is lossy even if we use a regular integer-to-pointer cast (or `from_exposed_addr`) for the conversion back to a pointer, since the original provenance might never have been exposed. +Compared to declaring the transmutation itself UB, this model has some nice properties that help compiler optimizations (such as removing unnecessary store-load round-trips). **/Update** + ## A new hope for Rust All in all, while the situation may be very complicated, I am actually more hopeful than ever that we can have both -- a precise memory model for Rust *and* all the optimizations we can hope for! The three core pillars of this approach are: - making pointer-integer casts "expose" the pointer's provenance, - offering `ptr.addr()` to learn a pointer's address *without* exposing its provenance, -- and disallowing pointer-integer transmutation. +- and making pointer-integer transmutation round-trips lossy (such that the resulting pointer cannot be dereferenced). Together, they imply that we can optimize "nice" code (that follows Strict Provenance, and does not "expose" or use integer-pointer casts) perfectly, without any risk of breaking code that does use pointer-integer round-trips. In the easiest possible approach, the compiler can simply treat pointer-integer and integer-pointer casts as calls to some opaque external function. @@ -328,7 +336,7 @@ Compositionality at its finest! I have talked a lot about my vision for "solving" pointer provenance in Rust. What about other languages? -As you might have heard, C is moving towards making [PNVI-ae-udi](http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n2577.pdf) an official recommendation for how to interpret the C memory model. +As you might have heard, C is moving towards making [PNVI-ae-udi](http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n2676.pdf) an official recommendation for how to interpret the C memory model. With C having so much more legacy code to care about and many more stakeholders than Rust does, this is an impressive achievement! How does it compare to all I said above? @@ -367,8 +375,8 @@ Because of all that, I think it is reasonable for Rust to make a different choic This was a long post, but I hope you found it worth reading. :) To summarize, my concrete calls for action in Rust are: -- Code that uses pointer-integer transmutation should migrate to regular casts or `MaybeUninit` transmutation ASAP. - I think we should declare pointer-integer transmutation Undefined Behavior and not accept such code as well-defined. +- Code that uses pointer-integer transmutation round-trips should migrate to regular casts or `MaybeUninit` transmutation ASAP. + I think we should declare pointer-integer transmutation as "losing" provenance, so code that assumes a lossless transmutation round-trip has Undefined Behavior. - Code that uses pointer-integer or integer-pointer *casts* might consider migrating to the Strict Provenance APIs. You can do this even on stable with [this polyfill crate](https://crates.io/crates/sptr). However, such code *is and remains* well-defined. It just might not be optimized as well as one could hope, it might not compile on CHERI, and Miri will probably miss some bugs. @@ -421,6 +429,10 @@ My personal stance is that we should not let the cast synthesize a new provenanc This would entirely lose the benefit I discussed above of making pointer-integer round-trips a *local* concern -- if these round-trips produce new, never-before-seen kinds of provenance, then the entire rest of the memory model has to define how it deals with those provenances. We already have no choice but treat pointer-integer casts as an operation with side-effects; let's just do the same with integer-pointer casts and remain sure that no matter what the aliasing rules are, they will work fine even in the presence of pointer-integer round-trips. +That said, under this model integer-pointer casts still have no side-effect, in the sense that just removing them (if their result is unused) is fine. +Hence, it *could* make sense to implicitly perform integer-pointer casts in some situations, like when an integer value (without provenance) is used in a pointer operation (due to an integer-to-pointer transmutation). +This breaks some optimizations like load fusion (turning two loads into one assumes the same provenance was picked both times), but most optimizations (in particular dead code elimination) are unaffected. + #### What about LLVM? I discussed above how my vision for Rust relates to the direction C is moving towards.