[mmwelt]

> And by widely leveraged, I mean almost completely ubiquitous, if you’re using HTTPS, chances are you’re using OpenSSL. Almost everyone is.

This is probably a bit of an exaggeration. There are quite a few other SSL implementations that actually are also "widely leveraged"[1]. In particular, LibreSSL was forked and cleaned up after Heartbleed. Google uses BoringSSL. GnuTLS is widely used and unrelated to OpenSSL.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_TLS_implementati...

[JSGdev]

Yep we've been using rustls for most of a year no issues. Memory safety go brrr :) Would encourage others to take a look at it. Ring is a good base that's been audited and the lower attack surface from no old openssl bloat code makes a difference.

[justinjlynn]

Ring, unfortunately, has quite toxic project leadership with a history of making hostile decisions towards their contributors and userbase ( see https://github.com/briansmith/ring/issues/774 for one example ). Something to be aware of if you're considering building with it.

[tpxl]

That looks reasonable to me. The author is blunt about how he does things and why he does them, while being polite.

Don't know what 'yanking' a crate means specifically, but that seems like an ecosystem problem; in Java for example, maven dependencies are supposed to be immutable and the largest distributor (mvnrepository) doesn't allow updating a package.

[justinjlynn]

Yanking crates makes them entirely unavailable for downstream users unless they've already locked the yanked version locally. This breaks dependencies and unlocked builds. Yanking crates is a last resort measure (a fundamentally broken release or a release for which you've issued a security advisory) and not something which should be done trivially regardless of whether or not it breaks all of your users for reasons related only to one's own conflicts of interest (i.e. You won't support it because the person asking you doesn't have a support contract). The author is most certainly entitled to be blunt about their support policy. They are not entitled to disregard community conventions when using community provided package hosting services.

[dochtman]

Note that the ring maintainer has long since stopped yanking releases.

More importantly, it seems ring has recently hit a long dry spell of getting no new commits at all. There has been some light maintenance work recently, but outside contributions haven't had a credible path into the main branch for a long while now.

[briansmith]

The the old yanking policy was extra work I did with the intent to help people. It was unfortunate that Cargo had that bug, but also I should have been much more diplomatic in how I dealt with it.

I've just returned from a long break and I do have a concrete plan to catch up on the backlog. I have concrete plans for making it easier for people to get their PRs merged, making ring portable to all platforms, and eliminating all the remaining bits of C code in the next two quarters.

Feel free to reach out privately if you want to talk: [e-mail].

[justinjlynn]

That's awesome. Thanks heaps, Brian. I really appreciate your re-commitment. Apropos, Re: making ring portable to all platforms: IBM have been graciously maintaining a up to date patchset for Ring for years now and there's an outstanding PR here you may not have seen since they filed it in 2020... https://github.com/briansmith/ring/pull/1057

[jeroenhd]

I wouldn't call it toxic per se. It's a very business oriented approach.

Using ring without a support contract is clearly a terrible decision. It's not a library any open source project or other library should depend on. Doing so will break your builds and the builds of others that use your library.

[est31]

Generally you are right that this yanking policy isn't great, there is better tooling around to address security vulnerabilities than cargo yank by the author of the library. But it seems to me that it has been reconsidered. ring hasn't yanked versions of its library for a while, outside of one very recent yanking of an alpha release.

There are also other recent improvements, like ring used to require latest rustc very quickly, nowadays it's having MSRV's of older than six months. it also used to be impossible to link together multiple versions of ring in one binary, due to native dependencies used by ring. This issue has also been addressed thankfully.

[drran]

It looks like author of ring library tries to protect their user base from security vulnerabilities, but hit by bug(?) in cargo, which changed from warning to error for yanked libraries. Anyway, no promises until API version 1.0.

[jeroenhd]

I don't really get the reasoning (if there's a security bug, surely you know you've fixed it?). I fully support taking down versions that have known vulnerabilities, like the broken OpenSSL crate mentioned in that discussion.

The bug in cargo made the issues worse but not by much. Pulling crates/packages from the repository will break the build for almost everyone because updating your dependencies to the latest version, especially with an API that is not backwards compatible, takes time. The author suggests bumping versions until the application compiles again and that approach an easily take an afternoon if one of your dependencies hasn't updated yet.

It's the equivalent of the curl team deciding to pull all non-modified distributions of curl more than two versions old, or Angular/React/Svelte/Whatever doing the same, because they don't know if those versions are vulnerable or not.

There would be chaos as suddenly Linux distributions could no longer be built, reproducible builds would probably fail in the forked copies, most web applications would fail to start.

Nobody is asking the author to support older versions, or to not break the API between versions. The API is unstable, it's not had a 1.0 release and it probably never will. All people ask is leaving the old versions up so other projects can still build.

Since the project is open source, I suppose it's possible for someone else to created a ring-unpulled crate that's just the ring crate but with old versions still up. Should be doable with nothing more than a bash script running on a server somewhere.

[drran]

Security is a tradeoff between usability and safety. In this case, the author of ring received a suggestion from Rust security group to yank old, unsupported versions to be on the safe side, which created usability problems with ring. Security-minded people are OK with that, while security-ignorant people are not.

[jeroenhd]

Availability is an important part of the CIA trifecta. A dependency being at the verge of being pulled at any time is a security issue by itself.

Not being able to build a fixed release for a vulnerability you discovered in your own code has a bigger impact than a theoretical vulnerability that results in... not getting feature and API updates?

The code author can release his code in whatever way he wants and he can take down all but the very latest version of his package if he wants. It just makes his package unusable as a dependency for any real-world applications.

[justinjlynn]

That's a rather charitable interpretation of events. Events which didn't need to happen. Events which happened for dubious reasons and which depended dubious reasoning.

[drran]

Demand your money back!

[justinjlynn]

Oh no. Just because they donate their time and effort the community can't criticise them; even if how they work and interact with the community hurts and embarrasses the community... it was all free after all and the community added nothing to it! /s

That's really not how it works when you work with others and use other's resources and time. Nobody's entitled to their effort, but they're also not immune to criticism from others for that effort if they hold that effort out for others - if they expect immunity because it's 'free' they're just wasting people's time and preventing the development of a solution which doesn't.

[Beltalowda]

I read through that issue, and it doesn't seem so bad? There is a disagreement, but I don't really see anyone involved being "toxic"?

[woodruffw]

Is GnuTLS widely used? People bring it up, but I've never actually seen it in a codebase (and I deal with a lot of x509 + PKCS code). I've seen more wolfSSL and mbedTLS than GnuTLS.

[saghm]

From looking at my currently installed packages, there are quite a few that depend on gnutls: ffmpeg, gnupg, libcups, vlc, and wget look like the ones that would be most well known. It's possible that they only use it as an option, but normally I'd expect it to only be an optional dependency if that were the case. I haven't looked at any of their codebases though, so no idea what they use it for!

[SSLy]

widely? depends on your viewpoint, but there are quite few consumers (look at the right column) https://archlinux.org/packages/core/x86_64/gnutls/

[shandor]

How is wolfSSL/SSH? I have come across them a couple of times, but not having anyone/anything ”famous” behind them when compared to GNUtls or mbedtls always made me somewhat wary.

[mmwelt]

One probably important project that uses it is OpenConnect, as the VPN servers would probably be listening on a port reachable on the open internet.

[Conan_Kudo]

One lesser known common user of GnuTLS is GNOME. Pretty much the entire GNOME ecosystem uses it.

[thayne]

Not to mention that a lot of places are still using openssl 1.1.1.