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Memory safe ‘curl’ for a more secure internet

daniel.haxx.se

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Re: Memory safe ‘curl’ for a more secure internet

#71

Post by steveklabnik »

steveklabnik wrote: post #58
quotemstr wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still annoyed that the Rust people screwed up error handling so badly. The designers should have gone with classical exceptions like other languages, but instead went for a fashionable-at-the-time combination of error codes and added exceptions (spelled "panics"), cribbed for some reason from Go. And on top of that, the Rust designers copied one of the most annoying parts of the C++ ecosystem: a compiler switch f…

> The overall result is that everyone pays the cognitive cost of exception (spelled "unwind" in Rust) safety Very, very few people have to think about unwind safety, because it really only comes into play when you're writing unsafe code, and relying on the ability for panics to be caught. Many folks aren't writing any unsafe, and many who are are doing it explicitly in a panic=abort environment. And most don't rely o…

Okay so, technically in theory you can introduce logic bugs, but not memory safety bugs, if you don't consider unwind safety in safe code. Logic bugs can happen in any code, of course.

The practical, day-to-day implications of this still round to zero, though.

Re: Memory safe ‘curl’ for a more secure internet

#72

Post by brundolf »

faitswulff wrote: post #12
navaati wrote: post #11

Wow, Rust being used in something as respected as cURL is a big endorsment !

And a credit to the author of cURL as well: > We’d like to thank Daniel for his willingness to be a leader on this issue. It’s not easy to make such significant changes to how wildly successful software is built, but we’ve come up with a great plan and together we’re going to make one of the most critical pieces of networking software in the world significantly more secure. We think this project can serve as a templa…

> one of the most critical pieces of networking software in the world

cURL is widely available and widely used, obviously, but I'm surprised to see it described this way. I've always seen it mainly as a way for people and scripts to conveniently try out endpoints and download files. But this makes it sound like more than that; does it get widely used in an infrastructural capacity?

Re: Memory safe ‘curl’ for a more secure internet

#73

Post by simias »

count wrote: post #49
kingkilr wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I don't love the proliferation of dependencies, from a risk perspective the raw number of dependencies isn't always the right metric. Looking at the authors and publishers numbers from https://github.com/rust-secure-code/cargo-supply-chain it's clear a lot of these are maintained by the same set of trusted folks.

This is true today, will it remain true?

You could argue the same thing for many big monolithic C projects though. How many of the original authors/maintainers are left in OpenSSL or the Linux kernel?

My main worry about Rust dependencies is not so much the number, it's that it's still a fairly young ecosystem that hasn't stabilized yet, packages come and go fairly quickly even for relatively basic features. For instance for a long time lazy_static (which is one of the dependencies listed here) was the de-facto standard way of dealing with global data that needed an initializer. Apparently things are changing though, I've seen many people recommend once_cell over it (I haven't had the opportunity to try it yet).

Things like tokio are also moving pretty fast, I wouldn't be surprised if something else took over in the not-so-far future.

It's like that even for basic things: a couple of years ago for command line parsing in an app I used "argparse". It did the job. Last week I had to implement argument parsing for a new app, at first I thought about copy/pasting my previous code, but I went on crates.io and noticed that argparse hadn't been updated in 2years and apparently the "go to" argument parsing lib was now "clap". So I used clap instead. Will it still be used and maintained two years from now? Who knows.

Re: Memory safe ‘curl’ for a more secure internet

#74

Post by computerphage »

brundolf wrote: post #72
faitswulff wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And a credit to the author of cURL as well: > We’d like to thank Daniel for his willingness to be a leader on this issue. It’s not easy to make such significant changes to how wildly successful software is built, but we’ve come up with a great plan and together we’re going to make one of the most critical pieces of networking software in the world significantly more secure. We think this project can serve as a templa…

> one of the most critical pieces of networking software in the world cURL is widely available and widely used, obviously, but I'm surprised to see it described this way. I've always seen it mainly as a way for people and scripts to conveniently try out endpoints and download files. But this makes it sound like more than that; does it get widely used in an infrastructural capacity?

If you put curl in a script that runs on every new machine in your infrastructure, I'd say that's pretty widely used.

Re: Memory safe ‘curl’ for a more secure internet

#75

Post by steveklabnik »

brundolf wrote: post #72
faitswulff wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And a credit to the author of cURL as well: > We’d like to thank Daniel for his willingness to be a leader on this issue. It’s not easy to make such significant changes to how wildly successful software is built, but we’ve come up with a great plan and together we’re going to make one of the most critical pieces of networking software in the world significantly more secure. We think this project can serve as a templa…

> one of the most critical pieces of networking software in the world cURL is widely available and widely used, obviously, but I'm surprised to see it described this way. I've always seen it mainly as a way for people and scripts to conveniently try out endpoints and download files. But this makes it sound like more than that; does it get widely used in an infrastructural capacity?

A "fun" insight here: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/11/14/i-have-toyota-corola/

Re: Memory safe ‘curl’ for a more secure internet

#76

Post by simias »

quotemstr wrote: post #55
bluejekyll wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This quote is interesting: “ I’m a bit vague on the details here because it’s not my expertise, but Rust itself can’t even properly clean up its memory and just returns error when it hits such a condition. Clearly something to fix before a libcurl with hyper could claim identical behavior and never to leak memory”. So Rust aborts on invalid memory accesses, unwrap on None, etc. It does not abort on memory leaks. I do…

I'm still annoyed that the Rust people screwed up error handling so badly. The designers should have gone with classical exceptions like other languages, but instead went for a fashionable-at-the-time combination of error codes and added exceptions (spelled "panics"), cribbed for some reason from Go. And on top of that, the Rust designers copied one of the most annoying parts of the C++ ecosystem: a compiler switch f…

Most applications are not supposed to survive a panic!(), to the point where I personally tend to use "panic = 'abort'" for any code where performance matters. As such it's not really a mental overhead, and definitely not the Rust way of doing error handling (in the same way than using "assert" and a signal handler is not the way you're supposed to do error handling in C++).

The Rust way of dealing with errors is to return a Result and in my experience it's the best system I've used. It doesn't have the code flow breaking aspect of exceptions while being a lot nicer and less error-prone than C or Go style error handling.

Re: Memory safe ‘curl’ for a more secure internet

#77

Post by woodrowbarlow »

brundolf wrote: post #72
faitswulff wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And a credit to the author of cURL as well: > We’d like to thank Daniel for his willingness to be a leader on this issue. It’s not easy to make such significant changes to how wildly successful software is built, but we’ve come up with a great plan and together we’re going to make one of the most critical pieces of networking software in the world significantly more secure. We think this project can serve as a templa…

> one of the most critical pieces of networking software in the world cURL is widely available and widely used, obviously, but I'm surprised to see it described this way. I've always seen it mainly as a way for people and scripts to conveniently try out endpoints and download files. But this makes it sound like more than that; does it get widely used in an infrastructural capacity?

the binary `curl` is just a CLI frontend for `libcurl`. curl can do a lot more than HTTP. it can transfer data over 20-odd different protocols, including real-time streaming media. it's huge in embedded software.

Re: Memory safe ‘curl’ for a more secure internet

#78

Post by asveikau »

steveklabnik wrote: post #38
svnpenn wrote: post #32

I like this idea, but I dont know if Hyper is the best package to go with. Hyper occupies part of the Rust ecosystem that I think suffers from package bloat, like much of NPM. For example, currently Hyper requires 52 packages: autocfg, bitflags, bytes, cfg-if, fnv, fuchsia-zircon, fuchsia-zircon-sys, futures-channel, futures-core, futures-sink, futures-task, futures-util, h2, hashbrown, http, http-body, httparse, htt…

https://wiki.alopex.li/LetsBeRealAboutDependencies > These complaints are valid, but my argument is that they’re also not NEW, and they’re certainly not unique to Rust ... The only thing new about it is that programmers are exposed to more of the costs of it up-front.

> The only thing new about it is that programmers are exposed to more of the costs of it up-front.

That's funny, because it's only "new" if your experiences primarily lie in newer languages and communities. There's a lot of criticism of C, but one thing it does is make dependencies pretty explicit. Some say that's good, some say that's bad, I guess it can be both at different times.

Re: Memory safe ‘curl’ for a more secure internet

#79

Post by wool_gather »

brundolf wrote: post #72
faitswulff wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And a credit to the author of cURL as well: > We’d like to thank Daniel for his willingness to be a leader on this issue. It’s not easy to make such significant changes to how wildly successful software is built, but we’ve come up with a great plan and together we’re going to make one of the most critical pieces of networking software in the world significantly more secure. We think this project can serve as a templa…

> one of the most critical pieces of networking software in the world cURL is widely available and widely used, obviously, but I'm surprised to see it described this way. I've always seen it mainly as a way for people and scripts to conveniently try out endpoints and download files. But this makes it sound like more than that; does it get widely used in an infrastructural capacity?

libcurl (as opposed to the CLI) is extremely widely used according to the author (https://stackoverflow.com/a/55885729):

> At an estimated six billion installations world wide, we can safely say that curl is the most widely used internet transfer library in the world. [...] curl runs in billions of mobile phones, a billion Windows 10 installations, in a half a billion games and several hundred million TVs - and more.

Re: Memory safe ‘curl’ for a more secure internet

#80

Post by brundolf »

woodrowbarlow wrote: post #77
brundolf wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> one of the most critical pieces of networking software in the world cURL is widely available and widely used, obviously, but I'm surprised to see it described this way. I've always seen it mainly as a way for people and scripts to conveniently try out endpoints and download files. But this makes it sound like more than that; does it get widely used in an infrastructural capacity?

the binary `curl` is just a CLI frontend for `libcurl`. curl can do a lot more than HTTP. it can transfer data over 20-odd different protocols, including real-time streaming media. it's huge in embedded software.

Oh I see, I didn't realize its core was exposed as a library. That makes more sense!
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