go-licenses VS ring

> I don't think the exact URL is the problem, it is the fact that it is so easy to include dependencies from external repository that is the problem. In Rust every non-trivial library pulls in 10s or even 100s of dependencies.

But it's also quite a lot easier to audit those dependencies, even automatically (incidentally, GitHub provides dependency scanning for free for many languages).

> Then there is the issue of licencing - how to verify that I am not using some library in violation of its licence and what happens if the licence changes down the road and I don't notice it because I am implicitly using 500 dependencies due to my 3 main libraries?

This is also an automated task. For example, https://github.com/google/go-licenses

> go-licenses analyzes the dependency tree of a Go package/binary. It can output a report on the libraries used and under what license they can be used. It can also collect all of the license documents, copyright notices and source code into a directory in order to comply with license terms on redistribution.

> Rust and Go have solved memory safety compared to C and C++ but have introduced dependency hell of yet unknown proportions.

I mean, it's been a decade and things seem to be going pretty well. Also, I don't think anyone who has actually used these languages seriously has ever characterized their dependency management as "dependency hell"; however, lots of people talk about the "dependency hell" of managing C and C++ dependencies.

> Python and other dynamically typed languages are in a league of their own in that on top of the dependency hell they also do not provide compiler checks that would allow user to see the problem before the exact conditions occur at runtime.

I won't argue with you there.

Again, this is just a temporary situation, and a matter of burning down a list of small tasks. Not that the OpenSSL license issue is a big deal for most anyway. Feel free to help; see this issue filed by Josh Triplett: https://github.com/briansmith/ring/issues/1318#issuecomment-...

Note also that rustls depends on ring, which has architecture-dependent code in it that is not as widely compatible as eg. OpenSSL/GnuTLS/Mbed-TLS. For example, MIPS is not supported by ring.

The AWS Rust library we were using as a dependency depended on a cryptography library called ring. This library leverages C and assembly code to implement its cryptographic primitives. Unfortunately, cross compiling when C is involved can add complexity to the build process. While it might've been possible to overcome these issues I decided that it wasn't worth digging into more.

That'd be great. Thanks Brian. 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

Beyond the simple matter of Rust being much newer than OpenSSL, one concern for some cryptographic primitives is the timing side-channel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timing_attack

In high level languages like Rust, the compiler does not prioritise trying to emit machine code which executes in constant time for all inputs. OpenSSL has implementations for some primitives which are known to be constant time, which can be important.

One option if you're working with Rust anyway would be use something like Ring:

https://github.com/briansmith/ring

Ring's primitives are just taken from BoringSSL which is Google's fork of OpenSSL, they're a mix of C and assembly language, it's possible (though fraught) to write some constant time algorithms in C if you know which compiler will be used, and of course it's possible (if you read the performance manuals carefully) to write constant time assembly in many cases.

In the C / assembly language code of course you do not have any safety benefits.

It can certainly make sense to do this very tricky primitive stuff in dangerous C or assembly, but then write all the higher level stuff in Rust, and that's the sort of thing Ring is intended for. BoringSSL for example includes code to do X.509 parsing and signature validation in C, but those things aren't sensitive, a timing attack on my X.509 parsing tells you nothing of value, and it's complicated to do correctly so Rust could make sense.

machine learning, neural networks, image processing, cryptography (though it is getting better), font shaping/rendering (though it is getting better), CPU/software rendering (though it is getting better)