Rustls is a modern TLS library written in Rust. It uses ring for cryptography and libwebpki for certificate verification.
Status
Rustls is ready for use. There are no major breaking interface changes envisioned after the set included in the 0.20 release.
If you'd like to help out, please see CONTRIBUTING.md.
Release history:
- Next release:
- Planned: removal of unused signature verification schemes at link-time.
- 0.20.6 (2022-05-18)
- 0.20.5 included a change to track more context for the
Error::CorruptMessage
which made API-incompatible changes to theError
type. We yanked 0.20.5 and have reverted that change as part of 0.20.6.
- 0.20.5 included a change to track more context for the
- 0.20.5 (2022-05-14)
- Correct compatbility with servers which return no TLS extensions and take advantage of a special case encoding.
- Remove spurious warn-level logging introduced in 0.20.3.
- Expose cipher suites in
ClientHello
type. - Allow verification of IP addresses with
dangerous_config
enabled. - Retry I/O operations in
ConnectionCommon::complete_io()
when interrupted. - Fix server::ResolvesServerCertUsingSni case sensitivity.
- 0.20.4 (2022-02-19)
- Correct regression in QUIC 0-RTT support.
- 0.20.3 (2022-02-13)
- Support loading ECDSA keys in SEC1 format.
- Support receipt of 0-RTT "early data" in TLS1.3 servers. It is not enabled by default; opt in by setting
ServerConfig::max_early_data_size
to a non-zero value. - Support sending of data with the first server flight. This is also not enabled by default either: opt in by setting
ServerConfig::send_half_rtt_data
. - Support
read_buf
interface when compiled with nightly. This means data can be safely read out of a rustls connection into a buffer without the buffer requiring initialisation first. Set theread_buf
feature to use this. - Improve efficiency when writing vectors of TLS types.
- Reduce copying and improve efficiency in TLS1.2 handshake.
- 0.20.2 (2021-11-21)
- Fix
CipherSuite::as_str()
value (as introduced in 0.20.1).
- Fix
- 0.20.1 (2021-11-14)
- Allow cipher suite enum items to be stringified.
- Improve documentation of configuration builder types.
- Ensure unused cipher suites can be removed at link-time.
- Ensure single-use error types implement
std::error::Error
, and are public.
See RELEASE_NOTES.md for further change history.
Documentation
Lives here: https://docs.rs/rustls/
Approach
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 and TLS1.3.
- ECDSA, Ed25519 or RSA server authentication by clients.
- ECDSA, Ed25519 or 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.
- ChaCha20-Poly1305 bulk encryption (RFC7905).
- ALPN support.
- SNI support.
- Tunable fragment size to make TLS messages match size of underlying transport.
- Optional use of vectored IO to minimise system calls.
- TLS1.2 session resumption.
- TLS1.2 resumption via tickets (RFC5077).
- TLS1.3 resumption via tickets or session storage.
- TLS1.3 0-RTT data for clients.
- TLS1.3 0-RTT data for servers.
- Client authentication by clients.
- Client authentication by servers.
- Extended master secret support (RFC7627).
- Exporters (RFC5705).
- OCSP stapling by servers.
- SCT stapling by servers.
- SCT verification by clients.
Possible future features
- PSK support.
- OCSP verification by clients.
- Certificate pinning.
Non-features
For reasons explained in the manual, rustls does not and will 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.
There are plenty of other libraries that provide these features should you need them.
Platform support
Rustls uses ring
for implementing the cryptography in TLS. As a result, rustls only runs on platforms supported by ring
. At the time of writing this means x86, x86-64, armv7, and aarch64.
Example code
There are two example programs which use mio to do asynchronous IO.
Client example program
The client example program is named tlsclient
. The interface looks like:
Connects to the TLS server at hostname:PORT. The default PORT
is 443. By default, this reads a request from stdin (to EOF)
before making the connection. --http replaces this with a
basic HTTP GET request for /.
If --cafile is not supplied, a built-in set of CA certificates
are used from the webpki-roots crate.
Usage:
tlsclient [options] [--suite SUITE ...] [--proto PROTO ...] <hostname>
tlsclient (--version | -v)
tlsclient (--help | -h)
Options:
-p, --port PORT Connect to PORT [default: 443].
--http Send a basic HTTP GET request for /.
--cafile CAFILE Read root certificates from CAFILE.
--auth-key KEY Read client authentication key from KEY.
--auth-certs CERTS Read client authentication certificates from CERTS.
CERTS must match up with KEY.
--protover VERSION Disable default TLS version list, and use
VERSION instead. May be used multiple times.
--suite SUITE Disable default cipher suite list, and use
SUITE instead. May be used multiple times.
--proto PROTOCOL Send ALPN extension containing PROTOCOL.
May be used multiple times to offer several protocols.
--cache CACHE Save session cache to file CACHE.
--no-tickets Disable session ticket support.
--no-sni Disable server name indication support.
--insecure Disable certificate verification.
--verbose Emit log output.
--max-frag-size M Limit outgoing messages to M bytes.
--version, -v Show tool version.
--help, -h Show this screen.
Some sample runs:
$ cargo run --example tlsclient -- --http mozilla-modern.badssl.com
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx/1.6.2 (Ubuntu)
Date: Wed, 01 Jun 2016 18:44:00 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 644
(...)
or
$ cargo run --example tlsclient -- --http expired.badssl.com
TLS error: WebPkiError(CertExpired, ValidateServerCert)
Connection closed
Server example program
The server example program is named tlsserver
. The interface looks like:
Runs a TLS server on :PORT. The default PORT is 443.
`echo' mode means the server echoes received data on each connection.
`http' mode means the server blindly sends a HTTP response on each
connection.
`forward' means the server forwards plaintext to a connection made to
localhost:fport.
`--certs' names the full certificate chain, `--key' provides the
RSA private key.
Usage:
tlsserver --certs CERTFILE --key KEYFILE [--suite SUITE ...] [--proto PROTO ...] [options] echo
tlsserver --certs CERTFILE --key KEYFILE [--suite SUITE ...] [--proto PROTO ...] [options] http
tlsserver --certs CERTFILE --key KEYFILE [--suite SUITE ...] [--proto PROTO ...] [options] forward <fport>
tlsserver (--version | -v)
tlsserver (--help | -h)
Options:
-p, --port PORT Listen on PORT [default: 443].
--certs CERTFILE Read server certificates from CERTFILE.
This should contain PEM-format certificates
in the right order (the first certificate should
certify KEYFILE, the last should be a root CA).
--key KEYFILE Read private key from KEYFILE. This should be a RSA
private key or PKCS8-encoded private key, in PEM format.
--ocsp OCSPFILE Read DER-encoded OCSP response from OCSPFILE and staple
to certificate. Optional.
--auth CERTFILE Enable client authentication, and accept certificates
signed by those roots provided in CERTFILE.
--require-auth Send a fatal alert if the client does not complete client
authentication.
--resumption Support session resumption.
--tickets Support tickets.
--protover VERSION Disable default TLS version list, and use
VERSION instead. May be used multiple times.
--suite SUITE Disable default cipher suite list, and use
SUITE instead. May be used multiple times.
--proto PROTOCOL Negotiate PROTOCOL using ALPN.
May be used multiple times.
--verbose Emit log output.
--version, -v Show tool version.
--help, -h Show this screen.
Here's a sample run; we start a TLS echo server, then connect to it with openssl and tlsclient:
$ cargo run --example tlsserver -- --certs test-ca/rsa/end.fullchain --key test-ca/rsa/end.rsa -p 8443 echo &
$ echo hello world | openssl s_client -ign_eof -quiet -connect localhost:8443
depth=2 CN = ponytown RSA CA
verify error:num=19:self signed certificate in certificate chain
hello world
^C
$ echo hello world | cargo run --example tlsclient -- --cafile test-ca/rsa/ca.cert -p 8443 localhost
hello world
^C
License
Rustls is distributed under the following three licenses:
- Apache License version 2.0.
- MIT license.
- ISC license.
These are included as LICENSE-APACHE, LICENSE-MIT and LICENSE-ISC respectively. You may use this software under the terms of any of these licenses, at your option.
Code of conduct
This project adopts the Rust Code of Conduct. Please email [email protected] to report any instance of misconduct, or if you have any comments or questions on the Code of Conduct.