WOwolf550e·Dec 19, 2024
In Botan: Crypto and TLS for Modern C++rustls
rustls-ffi
Rust2022–2024
rustls / rustls-ffi
rustls-ffi
Use Rustls from any language
6Distinct people
6Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
171GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Use Rustls from any language
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
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
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
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 month6 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2022-11-01 16:16:22 UTC to 2024-12-19 19:16:36 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nov 2022 | 2022-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| Dec 2022 | 2022-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jan 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Feb 2023 | 2023-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Mar 2023 | 2023-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Apr 2023 | 2023-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| May 2023 | 2023-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jun 2023 | 2023-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jul 2023 | 2023-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Aug 2023 | 2023-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Sep 2023 | 2023-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Oct 2023 | 2023-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Nov 2023 | 2023-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Dec 2023 | 2023-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jan 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Feb 2024 | 2024-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Mar 2024 | 2024-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Apr 2024 | 2024-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| May 2024 | 2024-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jun 2024 | 2024-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jul 2024 | 2024-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Aug 2024 | 2024-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Sep 2024 | 2024-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Oct 2024 | 2024-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Nov 2024 | 2024-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Dec 2024 | 2024-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
6 sourcesThat would be a great solution, but full formal verification is a very high bar.
The more realistic answer is to use safer languages than C for this sort of critical work. Rust and Ada spring to mind. They could even expose a C ABI/API. From a quick search, it looks like this has already been achieved for TLS, but it sees little real usage. [0] There are also Rust implementations of SSH (Russh and Thrussh), but I don't think they expose a C ABI/API.
I'm surprised this rather obvious solution doesn't seem to even receive serious consideration. I'd be surprised if performance was seriously impaired. This blog post [1] found Rustls to be faster than OpenSSL. I couldn't find a similar performance evaluation for Russh or Thrussh.
[0] https://github.com/rustls/rustls-ffi
[1] https://bencher.dev/learn/case-study/rustls/
In OpenSSH BackdoorsI think GnuTLS is probably the second most popular TLS library, after openssl.
Though actually, maybe, firefox's NSS is now that I think about it a second more. Firefox is at least some fraction of C-library-based ssl traffic out there.
I'll also mentions s2n and rustls-ffi for completeness as C libraries, though the former isn't widely used, and the latter is very experimental still. https://github.com/aws/s2n-tls and https://github.com/rustls/rustls-ffi respectively.
In OpenSSL 1.1.1 End of LifeThere is a C API for anyone who wants to use Rustls from C:
https://github.com/rustls/rustls-ffi/
In Rustls TLS Library 0.21.0 Released with New FeaturesNo need to wait, at least for TLS https://github.com/rustls/rustls-ffi
In OpenSSL 3.0.7 fixes X.509 email address buffer overflowsReminder that rustls exists as a pretty mature TLS implementation in safe Rust (thus systematically avoiding issues like this). Thanks to Brian Smith for creating the webpki crate which was thoroughly engineered from the start to avoid stuff like this.
rustls has C bindings these days: https://github.com/rustls/rustls-ffi
I've started work on Python bindings too, with the idea that it probably wouldn't be crazy hard to do something that can pass as an `ssl.SSLSocket`. Please sponsor me on GitHub if that's something you'd like to use (https://github.com/sponsors/djc).
Note, we're aware that by far the biggest impediment to adopting rustls is the lack of support for IP addresses in certificates (we currently need a DNS name). This work is funded and should be completed in the next few months.
In OpenSSL 3.0.7 fixes X.509 email address buffer overflows