Book Image

Network Programming with Rust

By : Abhishek Chanda
Book Image

Network Programming with Rust

By: Abhishek Chanda

Overview of this book

Rust is low-level enough to provide fine-grained control over memory while providing safety through compile-time validation. This makes it uniquely suitable for writing low-level networking applications. This book is divided into three main parts that will take you on an exciting journey of building a fully functional web server. The book starts with a solid introduction to Rust and essential networking concepts. This will lay a foundation for, and set the tone of, the entire book. In the second part, we will take an in-depth look at using Rust for networking software. From client-server networking using sockets to IPv4/v6, DNS, TCP, UDP, you will also learn about serializing and deserializing data using serde. The book shows how to communicate with REST servers over HTTP. The final part of the book discusses asynchronous network programming using the Tokio stack. Given the importance of security for modern systems, you will see how Rust supports common primitives such as TLS and public-key cryptography. After reading this book, you will be more than confident enough to use Rust to build effective networking software
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Parsing binary data

A related problem is that of parsing binary data. Common cases where this is applicable include parsing binary files and binary protocols. Let us look at how nom can be used to parse binary data. In our toy example, we will write a parser for the IPv6 header. Our Cargo.toml will look exactly the same as last time. Set up the project using the CLI:

$ cargo new --bin nom-ipv6

Our main file will look like this:

// chapter4/nom-ipv6/src/main.rs

#[macro_use]
extern crate nom;

use std::net::Ipv6Addr;

use nom::IResult;

// Struct representing an IPv6 header
#[derive(Debug, PartialEq, Eq)]
pub struct IPv6Header {
version: u8,
traffic_class: u8,
flow_label: u32,
payload_length: u16,
next_header: u8,
hop_limit: u8,
source_addr: Ipv6Addr,
dest_addr: Ipv6Addr,
}

// Converts a given slice of [u8] to an array of 16 u8 given by
// [u8; 16]
fn slice_to_array(input...