Static Deadlock Detection for Rust Programs

Abstract

Rust relies on its unique ownership mechanism to ensure thread and memory safety. However, numerous potential security vulnerabilities persist in practical applications. New language features in Rust pose new challenges for vulnerability detection. This paper proposes a static deadlock detection method tailored for Rust programs, aiming to identify various deadlock types, including double lock, conflict lock, and deadlock associated with conditional variables. With due consideration for Rust's ownership and lifetimes, we first complete the pointer analysis. Then, based on the obtained points-to information, we analyze dependencies among variables to identify potential deadlocks. We develop a tool and conduct experiments based on the proposed method. The experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing deadlock detection methods in precision.