Foundations for a Rust-Like Borrow Checker for C

Memory safety issues in C are the origin of various vulnerabilities that can compromise a program's correctness or safety from attacks. We propose a different approach to tackle memory safety, the replication of Rust's Mid-level Intermediate Representation (MIR) Borrow Checker, through the usage of static analysis and successive source-to-source code transformations, to be composed upstream of the compiler, thus ensuring maximal compatibility with most build systems. This allows us to approximate a subset of C to Rust's core concepts, applying the memory safety guarantees of the rustc compiler to C. In this work, we present a survey of Rust's efforts towards ensuring memory safety, and describe the theoretical basis for a C borrow checker, alongside a proof-of-concept that was developed to demonstrate its potential. This prototype correctly identified violations of the ownership and aliasing rules, and accurately reported each error with a level of detail comparable to that of the rustc compiler.