Writing Parsers Like it is 2017
Pierre Chifflier, Geoffroy Couprie · 2017
Despite being known since a long time, memory violations are still a very important cause of security problems in low-level programming languages containing data parsers. We address this problem by proposing a pragmatic solution to fix not only bugs, but classes of bugs. First, using a fast and safe language such as Rust, and then using a parser combinator. We discuss the advantages and difficulties of this solution, and we present two cases of how to implement safe parsers and insert them in large C projects. The implementation is provided as a set of parsers and projects in the Rust language.