trophy-case VS ring

You could check cargo-fuzz trophy case, which is a list of issues that have been found via fuzzing.

I've added it to the trophy case.

That said, what's present in what quantities under what circumstances in the Rust fuzzing trophy case does a pretty good job of illustrating how effective the Rust compiler is at ruling out entire classes of bugs.

The same fuzzing techniques applied to Rust yielded a lot of bugs as well. But in Rust's case only 7 out of 340 fuzzer-discovered bugs, or 2%, were memory corruption issues. Naturally, all of the memory corruption bugs were in unsafe code.

https://github.com/rust-fuzz/trophy-case has like 70 of my issues in it, including the nine minidump bugs

If you have found any bugs with this tool, perhaps add them to the Rust fuzz trophy case?

Source: https://github.com/rust-fuzz/trophy-case (over 40 of those are just from me).

But to bring some data, check out the fuzz trophy case. It shows that failures in Rust are most often assertions/panics (equivalent to C++ exception) with memory corruption being relatively rare (it's not never—Rust isn't promising magic—but it's a significant change).

You need to read the list more carefully.

• The list is not for Rust itself, but every program every written in Rust. By itself it doesn't mean much, unless you compare prevalence of issues among Rust programs to prevalence of issues among C programs. For some context, see how memory unsafety is rare compared to assertions and uncaught exceptions: https://github.com/rust-fuzz/trophy-case

• Many of the memory-unsafety issues are on the C FFI boundary, which is unsafe due to C lacking expressiveness about memory ownership of its APIs (i.e. it shows how dangerous is to program where you don't have the Rust borrow checker checking your code).

• Many bugs about missing Send/Sync or evil trait implementations are about type-system loopholes that prevented compiler from catching code that was already buggy. C doesn't have these guarantees in the first place, so lack of them is not a CVE for C, but just how C is designed.

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)