On Sun, 04 May 2014 21:18:22 +0000 "Daniele M. via Digitalmars-d" <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Sunday, 4 May 2014 at 10:23:38 UTC, Jonathan M Davis via > Digitalmars-d wrote: > And then comes my next question: except for that malloc-hack, > would it have been possible to write it in @safe D? I guess that > if not, module(s) could have been made un-@safe. Not saying that > a similar separation of concerns was not possible in OpenSSL > itself, but that D could have made it less development-expensive > in my opinion. I don't know what all OpenSSL is/was doing, and I haven't looked into it in great detail. I'm familiar with what caused heartbleed, and I'm somewhat familiar with OpenSSL's API from having dealt with it at work, but most of what I know about OpenSSL, I know from co-workers who have had to deal with it and other stuff that I've read about it, and in general, from what I understand, it's just plain badly designed and badly written, and it's a miracle that it works as well as it does. Most of the problems seem to stem from how the project is managed (including having horrible coding style and generally not liking to merge patches), but it's also certain that a number of the choices that they've made make it easier for security problems to creep in (e.g. using their own malloc in an attempt to gain some speed on some OSes). >From what I know of SSL itself (and I've read some of the spec, but not all of it), very little of it (and probably none of it save for the actual operations on the sockets) actually requires anything that's @system. The problem is when you go to great lengths to optimize the code, which the OpenSSL guys seem to have done. When you do that, you do things like turn off array bounds checking and generally try and avoid many of the safety features that a language like D provides, since many of them do incur at least some overhead. Actually implementing SSL itself wouldn't take all that long from what I understand. The main problem is in maintenance - probably in particular with regards to the fact that you'd have to keep adding support for more encryption methods as they come out (which technically aren't part of SSL itself), but I'm not familiar enough with the details to know all of the nooks and crannies that would cause maintenance nightmares. The base spec is less than 70 pages long though. The fellow who answered the question here seems to think that implementing SSL itself is actually fairly easy and that he's done it several times for companies already: http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/55465 I fully expect that if someone were to implement it in D, it would be safer out of the box than a C implementation would be. But if you had to start playing tricks to get it faster, that would increase the security risk, and in order for folks to trust it, you'd have to get the code audited, which is a whole other order of pain (and one that potentially costs money, depending on who does the auditing). > > If I had more time, I'd actually be tempted to write an SSL > > implementation in > > D, but even if I were to do an excellent job of it, it would > > still need to be > > vetted by security experts to make sure that it didn't have > > horrible security > > bugs in it (much as it would be likely that there would be > > fewer thanks to > > the fact that it would be writen in D), and I suspect that it's > > the kind of > > thing that many people aren't likely to trust because of how > > critical it is. > Nobody would expect/trust a single person to do this job :P > Working in an open source project would be best. If someone around here implemented SSL in D, I fully expect that it would be open source, and I fully expect that one person could do it. It's just a question of how long it would take them - though obviously sharing the work among multiple people could make it faster. Where it's definitely required that more people get involved is when you want the code audited to ensure that it's actually safe and secure. And that's where implementing an SSL library is fundamentally different from implementing most libraries - it's so integral to security that it doesn't really cut it to just throw an implementation together and toss it out there for folks to use it if they're interested. > > Unfortunately, even if > > something better _were_ written in D, it's probably only the D > > folks who > > would benefit, since it's not terribly likely at this point > > that very many > > folks are going to wrap a D library in order to use it another > > language. > > > Here I don't completely agree: if we can have a binary-compatible > implementation done in D, then we would be able to modify > software to eventually use it as a dependency. I don't see the > necessary D dependencies as prohibitive here. If D were to be part of a typical Linux distro, a D compiler would have to be part of a typical Linux distro. We're getting there with gdc as it's getting merged into gcc, but I don't think that it's ended up on many distros yet, and you then end up with the problem of compatabitily, because while D is far, far more stable than it used to be, it's still pretty common that small things change or break over time (sometimes by necessity, sometimes due to regressions), so writing a D library that could be used on a Linx system with the same compiler version for several years is probably still a bit unrealistic (though we're getting closer). And without that, even with a solid C wrapper around it, nothing that's normally part of a Linux distro is going to use it. At most, you'd get the occasional, smaller project that used it. And as for Windows, that's not terribly likely to work at this point, because we only use the MS linker for 64-bit programs, and it's still frequently the case that Windows programs are build for 32-bit, because the developrs don't want to have to require 64-bit due to all of the 32-bit copies of Windows that are still sold. So, while it's theoretically feasible to have a D library wrapped in C and then used in C and C++ programs by folks outside the D community, I don't think that it's actually realistic at this point. > Thanks for your post Jonathan, however I believe that attempts > like Go's are what makes a language more real and less > theoretical. The field test of D on system-level software would > be in my opinion useful and sometimes I think the sooner the > better, to eventually modify the evolution of this beautiful > language (if there's still a viable window for this). It's mostly an issue of time and man power. I have quite a few projects that I'd like to work on for myself and for the D community at large, and I only have the time to work on a fraction of them, if that. And the same goes for many of the rest of the folks around here. We tend to try and direct our time and energy to projects that are of greater benefit (which often means not reimplementing stuff that exists in C and can easily be wrapped - especially if reimplementing it in D would be time consuming), but regardless of where we spend our time and energy, we just plain need more people to pitch in if we want more stuff implemented in D. Something like SSL is only going to be implemented in D if a member of the community decides that it's worth it to them to spend the time doing it, and they have the knowledge and expertise to pull it off. And given all of the other things that need to be done, I'm not sure that it even makes sense to spend time on implementing SSL in D as great as it would be to have such an implementation. We can't do everything, much as we might like to. - Jonathan M Davis
