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by gspr 124 days ago
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 :-(
5 comments
tialaramex 123 days ago
The primitives aren't a problem. You can't write them in any vaguely modern high level language. And when I say "High level" I mean that the way K&R does when they describe their new C programming language as high level. The reason you can't write cryptographic primitives in a high level language is that optimising compilers love clever tricks which offer data dependent performance, across every layer of their design - but in cryptography we want constant execution time regardless of either the plaintext or keys used.

The problem with OpenSSL isn't these cryptographic primitives, that's why you will see basically the same primitives re-used in lots of different places. It's like finding out that the guy who was just arrested for murder also eats pizza. Yeah, people do that. The problem wasn't the pizza, it was the murder. OpenSSL's implementation of the AES cipher isn't broken, the problem is elsewhere.

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PunchyHamster 123 days ago
The author also doesn't specify what that even means and what problems it causes
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yencabulator 121 days ago
You might like https://github.com/ctz/graviola/

Also, even if rustls is using aws-lc-rs, you still get the TLS parts from the rustls project, and aws-lc-rs is just lower-level crypto. That means there's less places for Amazon to say no; they either implement an algorithm or don't.

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koakuma-chan 124 days ago
there is https://github.com/RustCrypto/rustls-rustcrypto fwiw
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gspr 123 days ago
It's a great effort, but it's far from usable:

> USE THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK! DO NOT USE THIS IN PRODUCTION

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LoganDark 123 days ago
What? Ring is not even close to a fork of BoringSSL; it merely borrows subroutines from BoringSSL.
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gspr 123 days ago
Ok, maybe not a fork outright. But the project description says: Most of the C and assembly language code in ring comes from BoringSSL.
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toast0 123 days ago
That's the proper way to use OpenSSL and derivatives. Their C and assembly code for crypto primatives is good.

Protocol code and x.509 certficate handling will probably be better written in another language.

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