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11-year-old bugs found in Rust borrow checker
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11-year-old bugs found in Rust borrow checker

The gist

A reporter filed Rust issue #164250 on Oct 13, 2026, flagging a borrow-checker soundness hole.
The flaw lets safe code trigger memory corruption, testing Rust's core safety promise.

How it unfolded

  1. 2015Comment discussion traces the bug back as far as Rust 1.4.
  2. 2017Comment discussion traces the bug back to Rust 1.18.0.
  3. Oct 13, 2026jsnell opened issue #164250, "struct's lifetime requirements can be bypassed via covariant field assignment," on the rust-lang/rust repository, with labels including C-bug, I-unsound, A-borrow-checker and T-types added.

Sources

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