Tag Archives: rust

tcpproxy 0.4 released

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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Image courtesy of Hack A Day

This blog post was a bit delayed in the pipeline, but a new release of tcproxy, our educational async (tokio) rust command line proxy project, is now available for download (precompiled binaries or install via cargo).

I was actually surprised to find that we haven’t written about tcpproxy before (you can see our other rust-related posts here), but it’s a command line tcp proxy “server” written with two purposes in mind: a) serving as a real-world example of an async (tokio-based) rust networking project, and b) serving as a minimal but-still-useful tcp proxy you can run and use directly from the command line, without needing complex installation or configuration procedures. (You can think of it as being like Minix, but for rust and async networking.)

The tcpproxy project has been around for quite some time, originally published in 2017 before rust’s async support was even stabilized. At the time, it manually chained futures to achieve scalability without relying on the thread-per-connection model – but today its codebase is a lot easier to follow and understand thanks to rust’s first-class async/await support.

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Implementing truly safe semaphores in rust

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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Discuss this article on r/rust or on Hacker News.

Low-level or systems programming languages generally strive to provide libraries and interfaces that enable developers, boost productivity, enhance safety, provide resistance to misuse, and more — all while trying to reduce the runtime cost of such initiatives. Strong type systems turn runtime safety/sanity checks into compile-time errors, optimizing compilers try to reduce an enforced sequence of api calls into a single instruction, and library developers think up of clever hacks to even completely erase any trace of an abstraction from the resulting binaries. And as anyone that’s familiar with them can tell you, the rust programming language and its developers/community have truly embraced this ethos of zero-cost abstractions, perhaps more so than any others.

I’m not going to go into detail about what the rust language and standard library do to enable zero-cost abstractions or spend a lot of time going over some of the many examples of zero-cost interfaces available to rust programmers, though I’ll just quickly mention a few of my favorites: iterators and all the methods the Iterator trait exposes have to be at the top of every list given the amount of black magic voodoo the compiler has to do to turn these into their loop-based equivalents, zero-sized types make developing embedded firmware in rust a dream and it’s really crazy to see how all the various peripheral abstractions can be completely erased giving you small firmware blobs despite all the safety abstractions, and no list is complete the newest member of the team, async/await and how rust manages to turn an entire web server api into a single state machine and event loop. (And to think this can be used even on embedded without a relatively heavy async framework like tokio and with even zero allocations to boot!)

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SecureStore 0.100: KISS, git-versioned secrets management for rust

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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See discussion on r/rust or on Hacker News

A few days ago, we published a new version of both the securestore library/crate and the ssclient CLI used to create, manage, and retrieve secrets from SecureStore vaults, an open and cross-language protocol for KISS secrets management. SecureStore vaults provide a more secure and far more reliable solution to storing secrets in environment variables and a simpler and less error prone alternative to network-based secrets management solutions, and make setting up development environments a breeze.

For some background, the SecureStore protocol (first published in 2017) is an open specification and cross-language library/frontend for securely storing encrypted secrets versioned in git, alongside your code. We have implementations available in rust (crate, cli) and for C#/.NET (api and cli, nuget) and the specification is purposely designed to be both easy-to-use and easy-to-port to other languages or frameworks.

This is the first update with (minor) breaking changes to the securestore public api, although pains have been taken to ensure that most common workflows won’t break. The changes are primarily to improve ergonomics when retrieving secrets from rust, and come with completely rewritten docs and READMEs (for the project, the lib, and the cli).

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PrettySize 0.3 release and a weakness in rust’s type system

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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PrettySizeI’m happy to announce that a new version of size, the PrettySize.NET port for rust, has been released and includes a number of highly requested features and improvements.

The last major release of the size crate was 0.1.2, released in December of 2018. It was feature complete with regards to its original purpose: the (automatic) textual formatting of file sizes for human-readable printing/display purposes. It would automatically take a file size, pick the appropriate unit (KB, MB, GB, etc) to display the final result in, and choose a suitable precision for the floating numeric component. It had support for both base-10 (KB, MB, GB, etc) and base-2 (KiB, MiB, GiB, etc) types, and the user could choose between them as well as override how the unit was formatted. In short, it did one thing and did it right.

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Using SIMD acceleration in rust to create the world’s fastest tac

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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NeoSmart Technologies’ open source (MIT-licensed), cross-platform tac (written in rust) has been updated to version 2.0 (GitHub link). This is a major release with enormous performance improvements under-the-hood, primarily featuring handwritten SIMD acceleration of the core logic that allows it to process input up to three times faster than its GNU Coreutils counterpart. (For those that aren’t familiar with it, tac is a command-line utility to reverse the contents of a file.)

This release has been a long time in the making. I had the initial idea of utilizing vectorized instructions to speed up the core line ending search logic during the initial development of tac in 2017, but was put off by the complete lack of stabilized SIMD support in rust at the time. In 2019, after attempting to process a few log files – each of which were over 100 GiB – I decided to revisit the subject and implemented a proof-of-concept shortly thereafter… and that’s when things stalled for a number of reasons.

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Scripting in rust with self-interpreting source code

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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I have a soft spot in my heart for rust and a passionate distrust (that has slowly turned into hatred) for interpreted, loosely typed languages, but it’s hard to deny the convenience of being able to bang out a bash script you can literally just write and run without having to deal with the edit-compile-run loop, let alone create a new project, worry about whether or not you’re going to check it into version control, and everything else that somehow tends to go hand-in-hand with modern strongly typed languages.

A nifty but scarcely known rust feature is that the language parser will ignore a shebang at the start of the source code file, meaning you can install an interpreter that will compile and run your rust code when you execute the .rs file – without losing the ability to compile it normally. cargo-script is one such interpreter, meaning you can cargo install cargo-script then execute your source code (after making it executable, :! chmod +x %) with something like this:

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SecureStore: the open secrets container format

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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It’s been a while since we first released our SecureStore.NET library for C# and ASP.NET developers back in 2017, as a solution for developers looking for an uncomplicated way of safely and securely storing secrets without needing to build and maintain an entire infrastructure catering to that end. Originally built way back in 2015 to support secrets storage in legacy ASP.NET applications, SecureStore.NET has been since updated for ASP.NET Core and UWP desktop application development, and now we’re proud to announce the release of SecureStore 1.0 with multi-platform and cross-framework support, with an updated schema making a few more features possible and official implementations in C#/.NET and Rust.

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ignore-result: A simple crate to make ignoring rust Results safe and easy

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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Rust, both by design and by convention, has a fairly strongly defined model for strict error handling, designed to force developers to deal with errors up front rather than assume they don’t exist. If you stick to a few conventions and principles for best practice, error handling becomes fairly straight-forward (although what you ultimately do with the errors is a different question) if you are living in an all-rust world. The problems start when you step foot outside of the comfortable world of crates and Results, such as when dealing with FFI to interface with C libraries or using rust in an embedded context.

The typical approach for dealing with errors in rust in 2018 is to have any function that can encounter a scenario wherein it is unable to return a valid value declare a return type of Result<T, E> where T is the expected result type in normal cases and E is a type covering possible errors that can arise during execution. When calling from one such function into other functions with non-guaranteed success, the typical control flow in the event of an error is almost always “early out”:

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rsevents: manual and auto reset events for rust

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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One of the unique characteristics of Rust (both the language and the community that has evolved around it) is a strong acknowledgement of multithreading, synchronization, and concurrency, as witnessed in the design of the core language (which acknowledges OS concepts of threads with sync and send) and the presence of various structures in the standard library aimed at simplifying development of correct, multithreaded code.

rsevents is a new crate that should be immediately familiar to anyone that has done multithreaded programming under Windows: it exposes a synchronization primitive, namely, an event for use where Mutex – intended to exclusively marshall access to a variable or region of code – either does not convey the correct semantics or is not the right tool for the job. For those that didn’t come fleeing to rust from a Win32 background, in Windows an event is the lowest-level kernel synchronization primitive, which can be thought of as a “waitable bool” – it is either set or reset (on or off, true or false) and if it isn’t set, you can wait on it until it becomes set.

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Transparent encryption and decryption in rust with cryptostreams

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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C# developers have long been spoiled when it comes to quickly and easily getting up and running with encryption thanks to the .NET CryptoStream  class, which wraps a Stream instance in a second Stream that automatically encrypts/decrypts anything read/written to/from it before passing it along to the underlying Stream. Long story short, it makes it ridiculously easy to add encryption or decryption facilities to an existing pipeline, as after setting up the CryptoStream instance you can just treat it like any other Stream object and read or write to it normally.

Encryption has been somewhat of a sore spot in the rust ecosystem after a few false starts with “native” rust encryption libraries that went nowhere, but today the rust community has fortunately adopted the OpenSSL bindings as the approach of choice, and the rust-openssl crate makes it easy to both bundle and consume the openssl bindings from rust in a cross-platform manner. What it doesn’t do is make encryption and decryption any easier than OpenSSL itself does.

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