[IshKebab]

> If pointers and integers can be freely converted to each other

You can only freely convert integers to pointers with "exposed provenance" in Rust which is currently unstable.

https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/ptr/index.html#exposed-provena...

I find the idea of provenance a bit abstract so it's a lot easier to think about a concrete pointer system that has "real" provenance: CHERI. In CHERI all pointers are capabilities with a "valid" tag bit (it's out-of-band so you can't just set it to 1 arbitrarily). As soon as you start doing raw bit manipulation of the address the tag is cleared and then it can be no longer used as a pointer. So this problem doesn't exist on CHERI.

Also the problem of mistaking integers as pointers when scanning doesn't exist either - you can instead just search for memory where the tag bit is set.