BoringTun v0.4 Released For CloudFlare's Rust-Based WireGuard

[phoronix]

Phoronix: BoringTun v0.4 Released For CloudFlare's Rust-Based WireGuard

Back in 2019 the folks at CloudFlare announced BoringTun as a Rust-written WireGuard user-space implementation. Yesterday marked the first tagged release of BoringTun in the form of version 0.4...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=BoringTun-0.4-Released

[anarki2]

I fail to see the point. Simply rewriting in a different language is not a plus on its own. They might as well could've sent patches for the things they want to achieve.

[RahulSundaram]

I fail to see the point. Simply rewriting in a different language is not a plus on its own. They might as well could've sent patches for the things they want to achieve.

You are missing a lot of context, it's not just about the language, refer to https://blog.cloudflare.com/boringtu...ireguard-rust/

[bug77]

Cue the posts pointing out how Rust is going nowhere

[jntesteves]

I fail to see the point. Simply rewriting in a different language is not a plus on its own.

It's a well established fact that about 70% of all high- and critical-severity security vulnerabilities are the result of memory unsafety, that would have been avoided had software been written in a memory-safe language. The world's most well funded development team working on Google Chrome have acknowledged that security critical parts of it need to be rewritten in a memory-safe language.

Anyone who still fails to see the value of rewriting in rust are choosing blindness. The only reason the whole industry isn't migrating to memory-safe languages now that it's possible for pretty much every use-case is the sheer amount of work, not the lack of value. Starting to write new security-critical software in an unsafe language today would be reckless negligence.

[bug77]

It's a well established fact that about 70% of all high- and critical-severity security vulnerabilities are the result of memory unsafety, that would have been avoided had software been written in a memory-safe language. The world's most well funded development team working on Google Chrome have acknowledged that security critical parts of it need to be rewritten in a memory-safe language.

Anyone who still fails to see the value of rewriting in rust are choosing blindness. The only reason the whole industry isn't migrating to memory-safe languages now that it's possible for pretty much every use-case is the sheer amount of work, not the lack of value. Starting to write new security-critical software in an unsafe language today would be reckless negligence.

In a way, this is similar to garbage collection: sure you can collect your garbage in C, but who has really mastered that art? The difference would be that, unlike a garbage collector, compiler enforced correctness/memory safety comes with zero overhead. A win-win if there ever was one.

[kpedersen]

The only reason the whole industry isn't migrating to memory-safe languages now that it's possible for pretty much every use-case is the sheer amount of work, not the lack of value.

And going between language boundaries (i.e bindings between C and Rust) also introduce a number of potential memory / security vulnerabilities. In many cases you completely lose type safety.

[RahulSundaram]

And going between language boundaries (i.e bindings between C and Rust) also introduce a number of potential memory / security vulnerabilities. In many cases you completely lose type safety.

Do you have an example of C <-> Rust language binding causing security issues that wasn't otherwise an inherent security vulnerability?

In any case, that doesn't seem to apply here, BoringTun is a pure Rust implementation although it does offer bindings to be called from C which itself is safe to do.

[bug77]

Anyone who still fails to see the value of rewriting in rust are choosing blindness. The only reason the whole industry isn't migrating to memory-safe languages now that it's possible for pretty much every use-case is the sheer amount of work, not the lack of value. Starting to write new security-critical software in an unsafe language today would be reckless negligence.

I really don't see this as a matter of having to migrate everything. But kids learning to program these days now have a choice of C or Rust. This is what will change the landscape 20 years down the road.

[bug77]

Do you have an example of C <-> Rust language binding causing security issues that wasn't otherwise an inherent security vulnerability?

Binding to C code is why unsafe was introduced in the first place. And probably the only place t should ever be used.