Memory Safety and Programming Language Design

This is the webpage of course COMP737011 Memory Safety and Programming Language Design for postgraduate students at Fudan University. The course will first go through the Foundations of Memory Safety Problem; then we will teach the Rust Programming Language by focusing on its special design for memory-safety protection; finally we will share some advanced topics useful for mitigating memory-safety issues.

• Term: 2025 Spring
• Classroom: JB102
• Time: Tuesday 18:30-21:05
• Instructor: Dr. Hui Xu

Part I: Foundations of Memory Safety

Date	Topic	Materials	Code
Week1	Introduction, Stack Smashing	slides1, slides2, notes	vuln.c, shell.c, exstack.py, shell.c, rop.py
Week2	Allocator Design	slides	allocator.c
Week3	Heap Attack	slides	heaptoy.c
Week4	Memory Exhaustion	slides	stackoverflow.c, stackhandle, heap, smallheap
Week5	Concurrency	slides	atomicint.c, membarrier1, membarrier2

Part II: Rust Programming Language

Date	Topic	Materials	Code
Week6	Rust Ownership	slides	ownership.rs,mutability.rs,lifetime.rs,list-unsafe.rs,list-safe.rs
Week7	Rust Type System	Slides	sinlist.rs
Week8	Rust Concurrency	Slides	check_send_sync.rs, sinlist.rs, sinlist.rs
Week9	More Features of Rust	Slides
Week10	Rust Toolchain	Slides

Part III: Advanced Topics

Date	Topic	Materials
Week11	Alias Analysis	Slides
Week12	Alias Analysis
Week13	Range Analysis
Week14	Verification
Week15	Project Report
Week16	Project Report