Rust is a relatively new programming language that targets efficient and safe
systems-level applications. It includes a sophisticated type system that
allows for provable memory- and thread-safety, and is explicitly designed to
take the place of unsafe languages such as C and C++ in the coding ecosystem.
There is a large existing C and C++ codebase (many of which have been affected
by bugs and security vulnerabilities due to unsafety) that would benefit from
being rewritten in Rust to remove an entire class of potential bugs. However,
porting these applications to Rust manually is a daunting task.

In this paper we investigate the problem of automatically translating C
programs into safer Rust programs–that is, Rust programs that
improve on the safety guarantees of the original C programs. We conduct an
in-depth study into the underlying causes of unsafety in translated programs
and the relative impact of fixing each cause. We also describe a novel
technique for automatically removing a particular cause of unsafety and
evaluate its effectiveness and impact. This paper presents the first empirical
study of unsafety in translated Rust programs (as opposed to programs
originally written in Rust) and also the first technique for automatically
removing causes of unsafety in translated Rust programs.