tialaramex (u/tialaramex)

tialaramex commented on The Tor Project is switching to Rust itsfoss.com/news/tor-rust... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

Thorrez · 2 days ago

What do you mean by "exactly the same as your connection setup."? Are you talking about TCP?

This TLS handshake can only happen after the TCP handshake, right? So 1 rtt for TCP, + 1 rtt for TLS. 2 rtt total. (2.5 rtt for the server to start receiving actual data. 3 rtt for the client to receive the actual response.)

tialaramex · 2 days ago

Today, Tor doesn't move QUIC so you'd have to do TCP, but that's not actually a design requirement of Tor, a future Tor could actually deliver QUIC instead. QUIC is encrypted with TLS 1.3 so your first packet as the client is that Hello packet, there's no TCP layer.

QUIC really wants to do discovery to figure out a better way to move the data and of course Tor doesn't want discovery that's the whole point, so these features are in tension, but that's not hard to resolve in Tor's favour from what I can see.

tialaramex commented on The Tor Project is switching to Rust itsfoss.com/news/tor-rust... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

GuB-42 · 2 days ago

From the looks of it, Rust is usable un a tiny embedded system but it is not "great". I think that out of the recent, trendy languages, Zig is the best suited for this task, but in practice C is still king.

The big thing is memory allocation, sometimes, on tiny systems, you can't malloc() at all, you also have to be careful about your stack, which is often no more than a few kB. Rust, like modern C++ tend to abstract away these things, which is perfectly fine on Linux and a good thing when you have a lot of dynamic structures, but one a tiny system, you usually want full control. Rust can do that, I think, like C++, it is just not what it does best. C works well because it does nothing unless you explicitly ask for it, and Zig took that philosophy and ran away with it, making memory allocation even more explicit.

tialaramex · 2 days ago

It probably depends how tiny you mean. If the reason you can't allocate memory is because the only 1024 bytes of static RAM is all stack, then, yeah, Rust won't be very comfortable on that hardware. On the other hand C isn't exactly a barrel of laughs either. In my mind if I can sensibly chart what each byte of RAM is used for on a whiteboard then we should write machine code by hand and skip "high level" languages entirely.

tialaramex commented on The Tor Project is switching to Rust itsfoss.com/news/tor-rust... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

mapt · 2 days ago

Plus TLS handshakes.

5 proxies does it even slower but would make attacks much more difficult.

tialaramex · 2 days ago

The modern TLS 1.3 handshake is exactly the same as your connection setup. If we ignore the fact that (Because Middleboxes) you have to pretend you're talking TLS 1.2 it goes like this:

Client: "Hi, some.web.site.example please, I want to talk HTTP and I assume you know how AES works and I've randomly picked these numbers to agree the AES key"

Server: "Hi, I do know AES and I've picked these other numbers so now we're good."

Included in the very same packet as that response from the server is the (now AES encrypted) first things the TLS server wants to say e.g. to prove who it is, and agree that it knows HTTP as well.

0RT is a (very dangerous, do not use unless you understand exactly what you're doing) extension for some niche applications where we can safely skip even this roundtrip, also included in TLS 1.3

tialaramex commented on The Tor Project is switching to Rust itsfoss.com/news/tor-rust... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

buildbuildbuild · 2 days ago

This was mostly funded by Zcash Community Grants. Good things can come from crypto R&D.

tialaramex · 2 days ago

Pecunia non olet

I think perhaps cryptocurrency is worse than selling urine for its chemical properties, but the principle applies, money is just money

tialaramex commented on The Tor Project is switching to Rust itsfoss.com/news/tor-rust... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

giancarlostoro · 2 days ago

I still wish Mozilla had kept oxidizing Firefox. It would have been a net positive for Rust itself.

tialaramex · 2 days ago

I mean, they are, so presumably you mean more quickly ? There's a HN article about this after Mozilla fired loads of Rust hackers, and a larger fraction of the Firefox codebase is in Rust than was then, which was in turn more than in 2021 when I first was interested.

It's possible that if Rust had remained "secret sauce" for Mozilla it would have hurt its usage elsewhere, impossible at this distance in time to be sure. There is, for example, far less Rust in Chromium (less than 4%) than in Firefox (more than 12%).

tialaramex commented on The Tor Project is switching to Rust itsfoss.com/news/tor-rust... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

concinds · 2 days ago

We could move past all the unproductive, polarized online arguments if everyone accepted that:

1. Programmer skill and talent are not enough to achieve similar security properties with memory-unsafe languages as with memory-safe languages.

2. Therefore, "memory-safe languages are technically superior, period, for applications processing untrusted data where security is an important goal", is not an un-nuanced argument nor a Rust fanboy argument, but self-evident.

That still leaves a lot of room for other languages (Rust is not my favorite language), but it pushes back against the developer equivalent of doctors and pilots resisting the adoption of checklists for decades because "I wouldn't make those kinds of mistakes so stop messing with my work".

tialaramex · 2 days ago

C++ in particular has a thriving industry of people who'll come teach your team to write "proper" C++.

You've probably heard that "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it" and so of course we shouldn't expect such people to say "Don't write this in C++" when they can instead get paid to teach "How to write this in C++" for 2-3 days and feel like they made the world a better place on top.

It so happens Rust is my favourite language, or at least, my favourite general purpose language, but it's also true that I am currently mostly paid to write C# and I see absolutely no reason why I'd say "No, this should be Rust" for most work I do in C#

tialaramex commented on Stop Breaking TLS markround.com/blog/2025/1... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

dns_snek · 2 days ago

The first quote was about them having nearly unlimited power for targeted surveillance and the second was about not having such power for mass surveillance. You keep confusing them.

Just stick to your original claim that I responded to - I addressed it in the second half of my previous comment which you glossed over.

tialaramex · 2 days ago

There's no "nearly" in your statement. "a backdoor, or have the capability to add a backdoor in the hardware that generates those keys" is the same God powers claim again. If you now want to water it down with enough caveats it's nothing, this reminds me of how people go from "In lab conditions we can do a timing attack on the electronics from a FIDO key" to imagining that outfits like this just routinely bypass FIDO and so it's worthless.

It's very difficult and expensive to attack our encryption technologies, and so it's correspondingly rare. We are, in fact, winning this particular race.

Encryption actually works not because surveillance is now utterly impossible but because it's expensive. How you went from my pointing out that there's no evidence of this mass surveillance to the idea that I'm claiming these outfits don't conduct targeted surveillance at all I cannot imagine.

tialaramex commented on French supermarket's Christmas advert is worldwide hit (without AI) [video] youtube.com/watch?v=Na9Vm... · Posted by u/gbugniot

latexr · 2 days ago

> bees make honey for a reason

For themselves. To eat. So it’s easy to understand the argument that you’re harming them directly by stealing their honey, which is the result of their labour.

But surely there’s nuance there. I don’t doubt there are ethical growers who provide bees with an extra nice and controlled environment, plus care for them and help them fight pests, and thus feel like taking a share of the produced honey is a fair trade. The bees might agree.

> "So that humans can eat it" isn't the reason in either case.

But it is. In the case of many fruits, the goal is for an animal (humans included) to eat them, seeds and all, then poop them out (bonus fertiliser) somewhere else.

> That's still an arbitrary line, but so are most things.

No disagreement there, but I don’t see how any of that is relevant to my comment. I was correcting a misconception about mushrooms, not debating the nuances of vegan opinions. I don’t care for the label and don’t think it’s helpful to fight about what it means. It’s much more important to strive to be progressively better than to aim for perfection and fail.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46231187#46242623

tialaramex · 2 days ago

Essentially all modern honey farming is what you're calling "ethical". It's too expensive to replace the colony each year now that we have an alternative, and a winter - even a relatively mild winter in most parts of the world - will kill the bees if you've stolen all their food.

Unlike the maple tree, we do know how to substitute the valuable honey for nutritionally similar but cheaper alternatives - you can buy suitable food commercially because this is a whole industry, nevertheless, vegans object to our intervention, the bees didn't make nutritionally equivalent bee food, they made honey. Even farmers who choose to calibrate and remove only some honey, judging what will be enough for their colony to survive, are considered not to meet vegan requirements for the same reason.

To the extent there's a shared definition it really is as simple as originally explained, animal: not OK, non-animal: fine.

One of my professors (who is now vegan) had an ethical rule prohibiting eating things which, like him, had backbones. Same idea, it's more similar to me, therefore don't eat it. All such lines in the sand are somewhat arbitrary.

tialaramex commented on Stop Breaking TLS markround.com/blog/2025/1... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

dns_snek · 3 days ago

That's never been my stance because there's a difference between mass surveillance and targeted surveillance. If you understood that then you wouldn't be getting lost and making silly references to "God".

I don't believe that the NSA is omniscient. I believe they have 95% of data on 95% of the population through mass surveillance, and 99.9% of data on 99.9% of people of interest through targeted surveillance.

You think abusing public CAs for mass surveillance is a genius idea, and that its lack of real-world abuse proves that mass surveillance just doesn't happen - full stop.

Unfortunately you fail to consider that if they tried to do this just once, they would be detected immediately, offending CAs would be quickly removed from every OS and browser on the planet, the trust in our digital infrastructure would be eroded, impacting the economy, and it would likely all be in exchange for nothing.

On the other hand if you're trying to target someone then what's the point of using an attack that immediately tips off your target, that requires them to be on a network path that you control, and that's trivially defeated if they simply use a VPN or any sort of application-layer encryption, like Signal? There is none.

tialaramex · 2 days ago

> They either have a backdoor, or have the capability to add a backdoor in the hardware that generates those keys in the first place

> That's never been my stance

It took you about a day to go from being absolutely sure of a thing, to absolutely sure you've never believed that thing.

tialaramex commented on French supermarket's Christmas advert is worldwide hit (without AI) [video] youtube.com/watch?v=Na9Vm... · Posted by u/gbugniot

latexr · 2 days ago

> Like vegan find it OK eating mushrooms even though they are closer to us than they are to plants.

Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of fungus. Complaining about eating those is akin to complaining about eating apples; you’re not harming the tree.

tialaramex · 2 days ago

So, although it's difficult to generalize because exactly where the line is drawn varies from one vegan to another, it's generally not enough that the animal wasn't directly harmed.

For example the honey bees make honey for a reason, just as apple trees make apples for a reason and maple trees make a sugary sap for a reason. "So that humans can eat it" isn't the reason in either case. The apples and maple syrup are categorised differently by vegans because the trees aren't animals. That's still an arbitrary line, but so are most things.