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gspryesterday at 11:35 AM1 replyview on HN

Rustls still outsources cryptographic primitives. I believe the currently supported providers of those are… drumroll… AWS-LC and Ring. The latter is a fork of BoringSSL. The article describes AWS-LC and BoringSSL as "Googled and Amazoned to death; they don't care about anyone but their own use cases".

The state of things sucks :-(


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fulafeltoday at 7:37 AM

From safety point of view that's actually good enough for "perfect is the enemy of good" to apply here.

Cryptographic primitives are much much safer in C (and assembly) than protocol handling, certificates etc.

They are basically just "fixed size data block in, fixed size data block out". You can't overflow a buffer, you can't use-after-free etc, you can't confuse inner protocol serialization semantics with outer protocol serialization semantics, you can't confuse a state machine, you can't have a concurrency bug[1] etc.

C memory safety vulnerabilities arise from trying to handle these dynamic things which rustls fixes.

(Also, there are third party crypto providers implemented in Rust)

[1] from memory safety pov; for side channels rust doesn't have advantages anyway

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