Tag Archives: Rust

Programming

Asynchronous Again – Rewriting ptunnel in Rust

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Asynchronous programing model is quite popular for I/0 intensive tasks – it enables you effective use of resources, while maintaining agility of and assuring scalability of the application. I myself used asynchronous programming many times –   in JavaScript (where it’s omnipresent) , Python ( mainly  in asyncio recently, but also bit in twisted, which was one of first network asynchronous libraries I met) and also in OCAML with  lwt or Core Async. The concept is always similar for all implementations –  I/O operations are returning handles to future results – they are called either  Futures, Promises, or Deferred  – and they are returned immediately.  These futures can have functions attached to them, which are executed later, when I/O result becomes available.  Asynchronous  programming is very much about functions, it requires first class functions  and anonymous functions are very useful here, that’s why asynchronous model flourishes in functional languages.  Apart of I/O deferred processing usually there are other utilities for later execution – like timeouts, pausing execution for some time (sleep), tasks synchronization (events, locks). Futures are executed in an “event loop”,   a loop that monitors various events from OS (availability of data from I/O), timers, etc. to execute futures (meaning functions attached to them), when appropriate. It’s also very common to chain futures, executing second one with result of first one , when first one is resolved and result is available and the third one with results from the second one and so on. Apart of this basic scheme languages may provide some syntactic sugar around asynchronous model like await and async keywords in Python or C#, which makes it easier to write the code.

Recently, as I’m progressing in learning of Rust,  I wondered how asynchronous programing is done in Rust. I decided to remake my old project ptunnel (written in Python) into Rust – ptunnel is a program that tunnels arbitrary connection/protocol through HTTPS proxy, so it can be used to connect IMAP, SMTP or SSH through proxy. In the rest of this article I”l share my experiences from this project. Continue reading Asynchronous Again – Rewriting ptunnel in Rust →

Mathematic, Programming, Security

Secret Sharing Is Caring Too

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In todays digital world passwords and other types of secrets are omnipresent and they secure access to various assets dear to our hearts, some of those can have tremendous tangible or moral value. For such assets it’s worth to select really good and strong password, which basically means long and hard to remember. How to ensure ourselves in case of memory failure? We can write it down and lock in secure place, share with trusted person etc., but still there is one point of of failure – secure place can be robbed, that person can betray us. Can cryptography  provide us with better options?  Yes it can with help of method called Secret sharing – we can split secret into n parts – called shared secrets – and distribute them to different places/people. Later we (or someone else) need to collect k (k > 0 and k <= n) shared secret to recover original secret. k is called threshold and it is defined when generating shared secrets – so we for instance generate n=5 shared secrets, but only k=3 will be needed to recover original secret.

I believe you can easily imagine  many other real life scenarios where secret sharing can be useful and for sure it’s used in many applications and systems today. Cryptography provides several algorithms for secure (by design) secret sharing.  Most common is Shamir’s Secret Sharing based on linear algebra approach. There are many tools and libraries for Shamir’s scheme (and further advancements of original algorithm),  you can for instance try ssss, which provides command line tool that you can easily install into your Linux and also there is an online demo. Another family of secret sharing schemes is based on Chinese Reminer Theorem, where especially Asmuth-Bloom scheme is interesting.  I have not seen many implementation for Asmuth-Bloom secret sharing so I created one in Rust. Continue reading Secret Sharing Is Caring Too →

Programming

In RUST We Trust

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Having been programing recently mostly in dynamic untyped languages (aka Python and JavaScript) I though that it would be nice to try something else, bit different –  meaning compiled and statically typed. Last adventures in this area were with OCAML, which I used for few learning projects couple years ago( like this one).  OCAML is very nice language indeed, and learning exercise was very valuable for me (especially getting more accustomed to functional programming style),  but apart  of that learning experience I did not follow it  further (mainly due limited ecosystem of OCAML).

Looking recently to languages and technology survey on Stackoverflow  where Rust is leading the list of most “loved” languages (meaning developers who used the language like it and want to use it for their next projects) with head start on   second one (SmallTalk) .   This caught my attention and looking quickly at Rust site I decided to give it a try.  Below are my first experiences learning this language. Continue reading In RUST We Trust →