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rustls
rustls
Rust2016–2026
rustls / rustls

rustls

A modern TLS library in Rust

Security & PrivacyNetworkingLibraries & SDKs
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
36Distinct people
44Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
7.8KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

A modern TLS library in Rust

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 12:54:37 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year44 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2016-07-10 00:35:26 UTC to 2026-06-09 23:18:25 UTC.

024682016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 1 submissions, 4 comments20162017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 1 submissions, 5 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 0 submissions, 8 comments20212022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 0 submissions, 8 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 0 submissions, 6 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC514
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC615
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC808
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC808
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC606
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202

What Hacker News says

44 sources
arch-choot·Mar 4, 2026
Glad that it's published, I'd been following it since ESNI draft days. Was pretty useful back when I was in India since Jio randomly blocked websites, and cloudflare adopted the ESNI draft on its servers as did Firefox client side which made their SNI based blocking easy to bypass. There was a period where I think both disabled ESNI support as work was made on ECH, which now is pretty far along. I was even able to setup a forked nginx w/ ECH support to build a client(browser) tester[0]. Hopefully now ECH can get more mainstream in HTTPS servers allowing for some fun configs. A pretty interesting feature of ECH is that the server does not need to validate the public name (it MAY) , so clients can use public_name's that middleboxes (read: censors) approve to connect to other websites. I'm trying to get this added to the RustTLS client[1], n
Read the rest
ow might be a good time to pick that back up. [0] https://rfc9849.mywaifu.best:3443/ [1] https://github.com/rustls/rustls/issues/2741
In RFC 9849. TLS Encrypted Client Hello
mmastrac·Oct 23, 2024
As a library vying to replace OpenSSL, the same set of suites as OpenSSL. I'm no longer blocked on this particular issue that I filed on behalf of my work at Deno, but they aren't interested in adding less-secure suites that may be required by certain server configurations, but still appropriate for traffic that isn't general web-use. https://github.com/rustls/rustls/issues/1607 At some point I had a list of suites required to connect to some older versions of MySQL/Microsoft SQL Server, but again, no longer blocked. For server-to-server use where I don't control one end of the equation, I stick with the OpenSSL crate. If there's potentially older servers in the mix, I'm OK with using rustls as a backend for things like reqwest, but it'll be openssl for servers for now. I understand the philosophy, but rustls is never going to be an OpenS
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SL drop-in until this approach changes. Semi-related, I now avoid native-tls because MacOS + gatekeeper + weird JAMF configuration makes that library completely unreliable in the wild.
In Rustls Outperforms OpenSSL and BoringSSL
pbronez·Aug 3, 2024
Interesting that it relies on OpenSSL, either dynamically from the OS or vendored at compile time. I wonder what the implications would be for using something like rustls. You’d get TLS batteries included and kill a large external dependency… but possibly introduce behavior changes to low-level cryptographic operations, which is scary. Still, the maintainers stated that they don’t plan to implement Python’s readline module because they already have a rust implementation of readline. A similar argument could apply here - use native rust implementations of dependencies and expose them via the expected Python APIs. This would break some ambitious Python programs, but those probably wouldn’t consider alternative runtimes anyway. https://github.com/rustls/rustls
In RustPython: A Python Interpreter Written in Rust
nindalf·Jul 19, 2024
> memory safe openssl This is closer to done than not done. Rustls is a memory safe TLS library that is compatible with OpenSSL in API and has comparable or better performance [2]. It has also passed security audits [3] But your point stands. Rustls wouldn’t have been possible without open source funding. [1] - https://www.memorysafety.org/initiative/rustls/ [2] - https://www.memorysafety.org/blog/rustls-performance/ [3] - https://github.com/rustls/rustls/blob/main/audit/TLS-01-repo...
In FOSS funding vanishes from EU's 2025 Horizon program plans
nindalf·Apr 28, 2023
> Ring is mostly C/Assembly Crypto needs to be written in Assembly to ensure that operations take a constant time, regardless of input. Writing it in a high level language like C or Rust opens you up to the compiler "optimising" routines and making them no longer constant time. But you already knew this. And you also knew that the security audit (https://github.com/rustls/rustls/blob/master/audit/TLS-01-re...) of ring was favourable > No issues were found with regards to the cryptographic engineering of rustls or its underlying ring library. A recommendation is provided in TLS-01-001 to optionally supplement the already solid cryptographic library with another cryptographic provider (EverCrypt) with an added benefit of formally verified cryptographic primitives. Overall, it is very clear that the developers of rustls have an extensive kno
Read the rest
wledge on how to correctly implement the TLS stack whilst avoiding the common pitfalls that surround the TLS ecosystem. This knowledge has translated reliably into an implementation of exceptional quality. As a bonus, rustls is under active development with sponsorship from Google, AWS and fly.io, with the aim of making a high quality, memory-safe TLS stack - https://www.memorysafety.org/initiative/rustls/ You said > a standard library with feature flags and editions would make rust ridiculously much more productive What's the difference between opting into a library with a feature flag and opting in with a line in Cargo.toml? Let's say you want to use the de-facto regex library. Would it really be ridiculously productive if you said you wanted the "regex" feature flag instead of the "regex" crate? I do agree that the standard library does need a versioning story so they can remove long deprecated functions. Where it gets complicated is if a new method is reintroduced using the same name in a later edition.
In Microsoft is busy rewriting core Windows library code in memory-safe Rust
nindalf·Feb 3, 2023
> you could try to make OpenSSL memory safe by rewriting it in Rust Or just write a better crypto stack without the many legacy constraints holding OpenSSL back. Rustls (https://github.com/rustls/rustls) does that. It has also been audited and found to be excellent - report (https://github.com/rustls/rustls/blob/main/audit/TLS-01-repo...). You're suggesting writing this stack in a GC language. That's possible, except most people looking for an OpenSSL solution probably won't be willing to take the hit of slower run time perf and possible GC pauses (even if these might be small in practice). Also, these are hypothetical for now. Rustls exists today.
In Improving Rust compile times to enable adoption of memory safety

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