High Assurance Rust

This book is an introduction to building performant software we can justifiably trust. That means having sufficient data to support confidence in our code’s functionality and security. Trustworthiness is a hallmark of high assurance software.

With assurance as our driving concept, we’ll take a hands-on, project-based approach to two fundamental but often inaccessible topics in software development: systems programming and low-level software security.

You’ll learn Rust - a modern, multi-paradigm language that emphasizes speed and correctness. Most programming books teach a new language by presenting a dozen small, unrealistic programs. Not this one.

We’ll design, write, and validate a fully-featured alternative to the ordered map and set implementations in Rust’s standard library. You’ll gain a deep understanding of the Rust language by re-implementing one of its major dynamic collections, one idiomatic API at a time.

Unlike the standard version, our implementation will be:

  • Maximally Safe. Upholds Rust’s strongest memory safety guarantees, for all possible executions.
    • To test properties the compiler can’t prove, we’ll learn advanced program analysis techniques, including differential fuzzing and deductive verification*.
  • Extremely Portable. Capable of running on every operating system, or even without one (e.g. “bare metal”).
    • Our library is a hardened component. To integrate it within larger codebases, we’ll add CFFI bindings to make the Rust functions callable from other languages - including C and Python.
  • Highly Available. Offers fallible APIs for handling cases that could otherwise result in a crash.
    • E.g. Out-of-Memory (OOM) error - when all pre-allocated memory has been exhausted.

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