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Re: [tor-dev] Tor in a safer language: Network team update from Amsterdam



Howdy,

Thanks for making these points. They made me realize that this initiative:

http://bootstrappable.org/

Might not be on folks' radars.

It was an outcome of the last Reproducible Builds Summit in December [1].

It just does a good job of articulating problems and proposed some
possible collaborative steps forward.

peace,
gunner

[1] https://reproducible-builds.org/events/

On 04/01/2017 06:54 PM, zaki@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> Rust seems like the best available choice for Tor in a safer language.
> 
> Rust has several issues with securely obtaining a Rust toolchain that
> the Tor community should be attentive to.
> 
> Rust is a self hosted compiler. Building Rust requires obtaining
> binaries for a recent Rust compiler. The Rust toolchain is vulnerable to
> a "trusting trust" attack. Manish made a prototype and discussed future
> mitigations.[0]
> 
> The Rust toolchain is built by an automated continuous integration
> system and distributed without human verification or intervention.
> Rust's build artifacts distributed by the RustUp tool are only
> authenticated by TLS certificates. RustUp Github issue 241 discusses a
> mitigation to address some of these concerns but development seems to be
> stalled.[1]
> 
> 
> [0] https://manishearth.github.io/blog/2016/12/02/reflections-on-rusting-trust/
> [1] https://github.com/rust-lang-nursery/rustup.rs/issues/241
> 
> 
> 
> On Fri, Mar 31, 2017 at 2:23 PM Sebastian Hahn <sebastian@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> <mailto:sebastian@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
> 
>     Hi there tor-dev,
> 
>     as an update to those who didn't have the chance to meet with us in
>     Amsterdam or those who haven't followed the efforts to rely on C less,
>     here's what happened at the "let's not fight about Go versus Rust, but
>     talk about how to migrate Tor to a safer language" session and what
>     happened after.
> 
>     Notes from session:
> 
>     We didn't fight about Rust or Go or modern C++. Instead, we focused on
>     identifying goals for migrating Tor to a memory-safe language, and how
>     to get there. With that frame of reference, Rust emerged as a extremely
>     strong candidate for the incremental improvement style that we
>     considered necessary. We were strongly advised to not use cgo, by people
>     who have used it extensively.
> 
>     As there are clearly a lot of unknowns with this endeavor, and a lot
>     that we will learn/come up against along the way, we feel that Rust is a
>     compelling option to start with,  with the caveat that we will first
>     experiment, learn from the experience, and then build on what we learn.
> 
>     You can also check out the session notes on the wiki (submitted, but not
>     posted yet).[1]
> 
>     The real fun part started after the session. We got together to actually
>     make a plan for an experiment and to give Rust a serious chance. We
>     quickly got a few trivial things working like statically linking Rust
>     into Tor, integrating with the build system to call out to cargo for the
>     Rust build, and using Tor's allocator from Rust.
> 
>     We're planning to write up a blog post summarizing our experiences so
>     far while hopefully poking the Rust developers to prioritize the missing
>     features so we can stop using nightly Rust soon (~months, instead of
>     years).
> 
>     We want to have a patch merged into tor soon so you can all play with
>     your dev setup to help identify any challenges. We want to stress that
>     this is an optional experiment for now, we would love feedback but
>     nobody is paid to work on this and nobody is expected to spend more
>     time than they have sitting around.
> 
>     We have committed to reviewing any patch that includes any Rust code to
>     provide feedback, get experience to develop a style, and actually make
>     use of this experiment. This means we're not ready to take on big
>     patches that add lots of tricky stuff quite now, we want to take it slow
>     and learn from this.
> 
>     We would like to do a session at the next dev meeting to give updates on
>     this effort, but in the meantime, if team members would like to start
>     learning Rust and helping us identify/implement small and well-isolated
>     areas to begin migration, or new pieces of functionality that we can
>     build  immediately in Rust, that would be really great.
> 
>     So, for a TLDR:
> 
>     What has already been done:
>     - Rust in Tor build
>     - Putting together environment setup instructions and a (very small)
>      initial draft for coding standards
>     - Initial work to identify good candidates for migration (not tightly
>      interdependent)
> 
>     What we think are next steps:
>     - Define conventions for the API boundary between Rust and C
>     - Add a non-trivial Rust API and deploy with a flag to optionally use
>      (to test support with a safe fallback)
>     - Learn from similar projects
>     - Add automated tooling for Rust, such as linting and testing
> 
> 
>     Cheers
>     Alex, Chelsea, Sebastian
> 
>     [1]: Will be visible here
>     https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/meetings/2017Amsterdam/Notes
>     _______________________________________________
>     tor-dev mailing list
>     tor-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:tor-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>     https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-dev
> 
> 
> 
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Allen Gunn
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www.aspirationtech.org

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