Make It Memory Safe: Adapting curl to use Rustls

Published 2023-03-30

As I mentioned in my post about attending Real World Crypto 2023 and the Open Source Cryptography Workshop, I’ve given a talk discussing Rustls-FFI and the work to allow curl and libcurl to use the Rust-based, memory-safe Rustls TLS library in a talk called Make It Memory Safe: Adapting Curl to use Rustls.

Pulling Rustls into Curl was a Prossimo initiative at my day job.

This was supposed to be an in-person talk, but I got sick instead. I recorded this talk a few times, the first ones while still quite sick and, uh, oof. But in this one, I only have a cough (that I avoided triggering, hurray)!

Mass kudos to Jacob Hoffman-Andrews, the primary author of Rustls-FFI, for both the excellent work on the library but also for answering all my questions in preparation. All kudos to him, all blame for mistakes and errors in the talk to me!

In the talk, I mention that one of the items in Prossimo’s Rustls work plan is an OpenSSL API Compatibility Layer; I’ve been told that TabbySSL is such a compatibility layer, but that it isn’t under active development.

The slides for this talk are also available.