Although the mechanism of Rust Lifetime suggest people using local variable guaranteed to ownership is correct, we inevitably need to use global variables in some situations. Rust designer have added many limitations to guarantee that global variables are safe in terms of memory and threading, compared to other languages such as C/C++ and Python. These limitations indeed help developers avoid lots of crash or unexpected issues that are difficult to

Sometimes, we need to implement some libs using rust, and these libs should be loaded by other programs, which means we have to implement some interface for these libs based on the specific foreign interface standard. Usually, this specific standard is called FFI(Foreign Function Interface). It is an important mechanism that allows libraries to access functions from other programming language. In this way, we can use this mechanism call C functions in Rust language or call Rust functions in C language.

With the accelerating advancement of Rust language, more and more tech companies are recompiling their programs using Rust, especially client security software. However, there are few documents available that explain how to hook any functions using Rust. Therefore, I have written this blog to help you understand how to hook programs using the retour-rs crate for Rust. In the C language, two hook libraries, detour and MinHook, are commonly used and both have been implemented in Rust.