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“Why was Rust chosen for Libra?” in congressional hearing [video]

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Re: “Why was Rust chosen for Libra?” in congressional hearing [video]

#41

Post by buildzr »

cj wrote: post #8

Congressman: I was really surprised about the Rust language. So my first question is, why was the Rust language chosen as the implementation language for Libra? Do you believe it's mature enough to handle the security challenges that will affect these large cryptocurrency transactions? Facebook: [We will own & control the code.] Congressman: It looks like Libra was built on the nightly build of the Rust programming l…

That's fucking awesome, on the other hand, Rust code is running live in production in Firefox, exposed to the internet and actually offers a much higher degree of safety than many comparable languages - these questions they should have been able to answer readily.

Re: “Why was Rust chosen for Libra?” in congressional hearing [video]

#43

Post by jhgg »

Uehreka wrote: post #30
incompatible wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't the same apply to practically any programming language and development tools? What if they'd chosen Microsoft Visual C++? Would that be less exploitable?

With nightly builds, there’s more of a chance that a piece of malware could sneak in and get used to build a release of Libra. I’m sure the Rust maintainers would find it fairly quickly, but even within a few days there would be tons of Libra users with compromised wallets. More scrutiny goes into stable release builds than nightly builds, and more mature languages and tools have more experienced maintainers who are…

I don’t think anyone actually runs nightly against what’s on the latest / master. I know at work, we use nightly rust, but we pin to a specific date release, usually when the around latest stable is cut.

Re: “Why was Rust chosen for Libra?” in congressional hearing [video]

#44

Post by elgenie »

cj wrote: post #8

Congressman: I was really surprised about the Rust language. So my first question is, why was the Rust language chosen as the implementation language for Libra? Do you believe it's mature enough to handle the security challenges that will affect these large cryptocurrency transactions? Facebook: [We will own & control the code.] Congressman: It looks like Libra was built on the nightly build of the Rust programming l…

The first question summary is … poor. Congressman's biggest concern after poking around on github seemed to be about international committers and a "native Nigerian" committing a lot of the code. (based on looking around the github-generated contributors pages for the libra and rust repos, I have no idea who he's talking about).

The second answer was: "This is a very technical question. We'll get back to you." Which is to be expected; there's no reason for Mr. Marcus to risk a felony by bullshitting in front of Congress about technical decisions.

Re: “Why was Rust chosen for Libra?” in congressional hearing [video]

#45

Post by fourier_mode »

derefr wrote: post #40

Is there a reason that it matters what the reference implementation of Libra is written in? A blockchain network is usually not considered healthy until it has multiple implementations of nodes running non-negligible parts of the network. I would say that Libra having such alternate impls is almost inevitable. Exploiting any flaw in a particular blockchain node impl, when there are multiple such impls, would then req…

> Is there a reason that it matters what the reference implementation of Libra is written in?

If a language implementation is new, then it is (in the pragmatic sense) more susceptible to security issues.

Re: “Why was Rust chosen for Libra?” in congressional hearing [video]

#46

Post by rvz »

tvanantwerp wrote: post #10

I don't think I've ever heard of a Congressman going to GitHub, poking around in some open source code, and then asking very cogent and relevant questions about it. This video is incredible if only because of that.

Perhaps they did their own research on Libra and prepared those questions before and then asked Facebook basic questions about the design & implementation of Libra.

Re: “Why was Rust chosen for Libra?” in congressional hearing [video]

#47

Post by voxl »

fourier_mode wrote: post #45
derefr wrote: post #40

Is there a reason that it matters what the reference implementation of Libra is written in? A blockchain network is usually not considered healthy until it has multiple implementations of nodes running non-negligible parts of the network. I would say that Libra having such alternate impls is almost inevitable. Exploiting any flaw in a particular blockchain node impl, when there are multiple such impls, would then req…

> Is there a reason that it matters what the reference implementation of Libra is written in? If a language implementation is new, then it is (in the pragmatic sense) more susceptible to security issues.

Two counters:

1. You entirely ignored the thesis of the comment you responded to. Which is that other nodes can be implemented in more "mature" languages.

2. I don't buy for a second that new languages are more susceptible. You can attach pragmatic all you want to the sentiment but it's not an argument.

Re: “Why was Rust chosen for Libra?” in congressional hearing [video]

#48

Post by em-bee »

tvanantwerp wrote: post #10

I don't think I've ever heard of a Congressman going to GitHub, poking around in some open source code, and then asking very cogent and relevant questions about it. This video is incredible if only because of that.

i have noticed over the past few years that more and more people with a technical and science background go into politics. it happened in singapore, china, a few countries in europe and it's probably happening more and more everywhere.

in general i think this is a positive sign.

Re: “Why was Rust chosen for Libra?” in congressional hearing [video]

#49

Post by epoch_100 »

MrMorden wrote: post #22
protomyth wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The title is misleading although technically correct. They did respond just not with anything more than a "we'll get back to you". I do like the basics of his questions "who is committing code to Libra" and "why are using nightly build of Rust". I get the feeling he is not happy with it given his mention of "not how we usually did releases in the DOD" and pointing out the non-US coder. It will be interesting to see t…

Of course Rust is international. Windows is international; Linux is international; VMS might possibly not be international. You'd think DoD would be buying Talos systems as fast as Raptor could spit them out, given all the talk about wanting things to be made in the USA, but even those will likely have parts from dozens of countries. I don't want to knock Rep. Riggleman too hard, since knowing what Github is (let alo…

In the video, Rep. Riggleman doesn't find issue with Rust being international; he instead notes that one of the primary committers to _Libra Core_ (not Rust) is Nigerian.

I had a similar response to yours when I read the top-level comment, but watching the video it's clear that his issue is very much _not_ with Rust having an international development team.

Re: “Why was Rust chosen for Libra?” in congressional hearing [video]

#50

Post by Lowkeyloki »

hsaliak wrote: post #37

This is a deeply technical and insightful question to ask. However, is this question on implementation detail the best question he could ask to determine the impact of Libra on the people he represents, or does it serve to satisfy his curiosity?

I agree that unless the point of the question was more of a power move to show he's not an idiot and that they shouldn't try jerking him around, the question doesn't seem particularly useful.

The action of creating Libra could be interpreted as an attempt to undermine US federal currency. Facebook is the first company with enough clout to actually succeed at widespread cryptocurrency adoption to attempt something like this. I think there are bigger issues to deal with than quibbling about languages and release cycles. I know that the congressman's unspoken question is really whether Facebook has considered the security ramifications of allowing foreign nation-states to meddle directly with our system of currency like they were able to meddle with our news media, etc. But we all know that great programs can be written in terrible languages and terrible programs can be written in great languages. If the congressman is thinking what I think he's thinking, I wish he'd come out and say it instead of beating around the bush.

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