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Friday, July 9th, 2021
| Time |
Event |
| 1:28p |
Security updates for Friday
Security updates have been issued by Debian (apache2 and scilab), Fedora (chromium and perl-Mojolicious), Gentoo (inspircd, redis, and wireshark), and Mageia (fluidsynth, glib2.0, gnome-shell, grub2, gupnp, hivex, libupnp, redis, and zstd). | | 1:53p |
[$] Syncing all the things Computing devices are wonderful; they surely must be, since so many of us have so many of them. The proliferation of computers leads directly to a familiar problem, though: the files we want are always on the wrong machine. One solution is synchronization services that keep a set of files up to date across a multitude of machines; a number of companies have created successful commercial offerings based on such services. Some of us, though, are stubbornly resistant to the idea of placing our data in the hands of corporations and their proprietary systems. For those of us who would rather stay in control of our data, systems like Syncthing offer a possible solution. | | 6:05p |
Announcing Arti, a pure-Rust Tor implementation (Tor blog) The Tor project, which provides tools for internet privacy and anonymity, has announced a rewrite of the Tor protocols in Rust, called Arti. It is not ready for prime time, yet, but based on a grant from Zcash Open Major Grants (ZOMG), significant work is ongoing; the plan is " to try bring Arti to a production-quality client implementation over the next year and a half". The C implementation is not going away anytime soon, but the idea is that Arti will eventually supplant it. The project sees a number of benefits from using Rust, including:
For years now, we've wanted to split Tor's relay cryptography across multiple CPU cores, but we've run into trouble. C's support for thread-safety is quite fragile, and it is very easy to write a program that looks safe to run across multiple threads, but which introduces subtle bugs or security holes. If one thread accesses a piece of state at the same time that another thread is changing it, then your whole program can exhibit some truly confusing and bizarre bugs.
But in Rust, this kind of bug is easy to avoid: the same type system that keeps us from writing memory unsafety prevents us from writing dangerous concurrent access patterns. Because of that, Arti's circuit cryptography has been multicore from day 1, at very little additional programming effort.
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