Rustls is a modern TLS library written in Rust.

Status

Rustls is used in production at many organizations and projects. We aim to maintain reasonable API surface stability but the API may evolve as we make changes to accomodate new features or performance improvements.

We have a roadmap for our future plans. We also have benchmarks to prevent performance regressions and to let you evaluate rustls on your target hardware.

If you'd like to help out, please see CONTRIBUTING.md.

Changelog

The detailed list of changes in each release can be found at https://github.com/rustls/rustls/releases.

Documentation

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 by default.

Current functionality (with default crate 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.

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.
• TLS 1.2 protocol compression.
• Discrete-log Diffie-Hellman.
• Automatic protocol version downgrade.
• Using CA certificates directly to authenticate a server/client (often called "self-signed certificates"). Rustls' default certificate verifier does not support using a trust anchor as both a CA certificate and an end-entity certificate in order to limit complexity and risk in path building. While dangerous, all authentication can be turned off if required -- see the example code.

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

Platform support

While Rustls itself is platform independent, by default it 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 32-bit ARM, Aarch64 (64-bit ARM), x86, x86-64, LoongArch64, 32-bit & 64-bit Little Endian MIPS, 32-bit PowerPC (Big Endian), 64-bit PowerPC (Big and Little Endian), 64-bit RISC-V, and s390x. We do not presently support WebAssembly. For more information, see the supported ring target platforms.

By providing a custom instance of the [crypto::CryptoProvider] struct, you can replace all cryptography dependencies of rustls. This is a route to being portable to a wider set of architectures and environments, or compliance requirements. See the [crypto::CryptoProvider] documentation for more details.

Specifying default-features = false when depending on rustls will remove the dependency on ring.

Rustls requires Rust 1.61 or later.

Example code

Our examples directory contains demos that show how to handle I/O using the stream::Stream helper, as well as more complex asynchronous I/O using mio. If you're already using Tokio for an async runtime you may prefer to use tokio-rustls instead of interacting with rustls directly.

The mio based examples are the most complete, and discussed below. Users new to Rustls may prefer to look at the simple client/server examples before diving in to the more complex MIO examples.

Client example program

The MIO client example program is named tlsclient-mio. 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-mio [options] [--suite SUITE ...] [--proto PROTO ...] [--protover PROTOVER ...] <hostname>
  tlsclient-mio (--version | -v)
  tlsclient-mio (--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.
    --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 --bin tlsclient-mio -- --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 --bin tlsclient-mio -- --http expired.badssl.com
TLS error: InvalidCertificate(Expired)
Connection closed

Server example program

The MIO server example program is named tlsserver-mio. 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-mio --certs CERTFILE --key KEYFILE [--suite SUITE ...] [--proto PROTO ...] [--protover PROTOVER ...] [options] echo
  tlsserver-mio --certs CERTFILE --key KEYFILE [--suite SUITE ...] [--proto PROTO ...] [--protover PROTOVER ...] [options] http
  tlsserver-mio --certs CERTFILE --key KEYFILE [--suite SUITE ...] [--proto PROTO ...] [--protover PROTOVER ...] [options] forward <fport>
  tlsserver-mio (--version | -v)
  tlsserver-mio (--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.
    --crl CRLFILE ...   Perform client certificate revocation checking using the DER-encoded
                        CRLFILE. May be used multiple times.
    --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-mio:

$ cargo run --bin tlsserver-mio -- --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 --bin tlsclient-mio -- --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.

Project Membership

• Joe Birr-Pixton (@ctz, Project Founder - full-time funded by Prossimo)
• Dirkjan Ochtman (@djc, Co-maintainer)
• Daniel McCarney (@cpu, Co-maintainer - full-time funded by Prossimo)
• Josh Aas (@bdaehlie, Project Management)

Code of conduct

This project adopts the Rust Code of Conduct. Please email rustls-mod@googlegroups.com to report any instance of misconduct, or if you have any comments or questions on the Code of Conduct.