Crate rustls

Rustls - a modern TLS library

Rustls is a TLS library that aims to provide a good level of cryptographic security, requires no configuration to achieve that security, and provides no unsafe features or obsolete cryptography.

Current features

• TLS1.2 only.
• ECDSA or RSA server authentication by clients.
• RSA server authentication by servers.
• Forward secrecy using ECDHE; with curve25519, nistp256 or nistp384 curves.
• AES128-GCM and AES256-GCM bulk encryption, with safe nonces.
• Chacha20Poly1305 bulk encryption.
• ALPN support.
• SNI support.
• Tunable MTU to make TLS messages match size of underlying transport.
• Resumption.
• Resumption via tickets (RFC5077).
• Client authentication by clients.
• Client authentication by servers.

Possible future features

• ECDSA server authentication by servers.
• PSK support.
• TLS1.3.
• OCSP stapling.
• Certificate pinning.

Non-features

The following things are broken, obsolete, badly designed, underspecified, dangerous and/or insane. Rustls does not support:

• SSL1, SSL2, SSL3, TLS1 or TLS1.1.
• RC4.
• DES or triple DES.
• EXPORT ciphersuites.
• MAC-then-encrypt ciphersuites.
• Ciphersuites without forward secrecy.
• Renegotiation.
• Kerberos.
• Compression.
• Discrete-log Diffie-Hellman.
• Automatic protocol version downgrade.
• AES-GCM with unsafe nonces.

There are plenty of other libraries that provide these features should you need them.

Design Overview

Rustls does not take care of network IO

It doesn't make or accept TCP connections, or do DNS, or read or write files.

There's example client and server code which uses mio to do all needed network IO.

Rustls provides encrypted pipes

These are the ServerSession and ClientSession types. You supply raw TLS traffic on the left (via the read_tls() and write_tls() methods) and then read/write the plaintext on the right:

         TLS                                   Plaintext
         ===                                   =========
    read_tls()      +-----------------------+      io::Read
                    |                       |
          +--------->     ClientSession     +--------->
                    |          or           |
          <---------+     ServerSession     <---------+
                    |                       |
    write_tls()     +-----------------------+      io::Write

These objects are not Send or Sync, so exist in one thread unless you make your own arrangements.

Rustls takes care of server certificate verification

You do not need to provide anything other than a set of root certificates to trust. Certificate verification cannot be turned off or disabled.

Getting started

This is the minimum you need to do to make a TLS client connection.

First, we make a ClientConfig. You're likely to make one of these per process, and use it for all connections made by that process.

let mut config = rustls::ClientConfig::new();

Next we load some root certificates. These are used to authenticate the server. The recommended way is to depend on the webpki_roots crate which contains the Mozilla set of root certificates.

config.root_store.add_trust_anchors(&webpki_roots::ROOTS);

Now we can make a session. You need to provide the server's hostname so we know what to expect to find in the server's certificate.

let rc_config = Arc::new(config);
let mut client = rustls::ClientSession::new(&rc_config, "example.com");

Now you should do appropriate IO for the client object. If client.wants_read() yields true, you should call client.read_tls() when the underlying connection has data. Likewise, if client.wants_write() yields true, you should call client.write_tls() when the underlying connection is able to send data. You should continue doing this as long as the connection is valid.

The return types of read_tls() and write_tls() only tell you if the IO worked. No parsing or processing of the TLS messages is done. After each read_tls() you should therefore call client.process_new_packets() which parses and processes the messages. Any error returned from process_new_packets is fatal to the session, and will tell you why. For example, if the server's certificate is expired process_new_packets will return Err(WebPKIError(CertExpired)).

You can extract newly received data by calling client.read() (via the io::Read trait). You can send data to the peer by calling client.write() (via the io::Write trait). Note that client.write() buffers data you send if the TLS session is not yet established: this is useful for writing (say) a HTTP request, but don't write huge amounts of data.

The following code uses a fictional socket IO API for illustration, and does not handle errors.

use std::io;

client.write(b"GET / HTTP/1.0\r\n\r\n").unwrap();
let mut socket = connect("example.com", 443);
loop {
  if client.wants_read() && socket.ready_for_read() {
    client.read_tls(&mut socket).unwrap();
    client.process_new_packets().unwrap();

    let mut plaintext = Vec::new();
    client.read_to_end(&mut plaintext).unwrap();
    io::stdout().write(&plaintext).unwrap();
  }

  if client.wants_write() && socket.ready_for_write() {
    client.write_tls(&mut socket).unwrap();
  }

  socket.wait_for_something_to_happen();
}

Examples

tlsserver and tlsclient are full worked examples. These both use mio.

Modules

internal

Internal classes which may be useful outside the library. The contents of this section DO NOT form part of the stable interface.

Structs

ClientConfig	Common configuration for (typically) all connections made by a program.
ClientSession	This represents a single TLS client session.
ClientSessionMemoryCache	An implementor of StoresClientSessions that stores everything in memory. It enforces a limit on the number of sessions to bound memory usage.
RootCertStore	A container for root certificates able to provide a root-of-trust for connection authentication.
ServerConfig	Common configuration for a set of server sessions.
ServerSession	This represents a single TLS server session.
ServerSessionMemoryCache	An implementor of StoresServerSessions that stores everything in memory. If enforces a limit on the number of stored sessions to bound memory usage.
SupportedCipherSuite	A cipher suite supported by rustls.
Ticketer

Enums

TLSError

rustls reports protocol errors using this type.

Statics

ALL_CIPHERSUITES

A list of all the cipher suites supported by rustls.

Traits

ProducesTickets	A trait for the ability to encrypt and decrypt tickets.
Session	Generalises ClientSession and ServerSession
StoresClientSessions	A trait for the ability to store client session data. The keys and values are opaque.
StoresServerSessions	A trait for the ability to generate Session IDs, and store server session data. The keys and values are opaque.