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)

Security

Security is often looked at as an afterthought in systems design. That is evident in common protocols; security related RFCs has historically been proposed after the main protocol. Notice that any communication over a public medium (like the internet) is vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks. An adversary might hijack the communication by carefully inspecting input packets from both sides. In light of that, some security related questions are reasonable: When a client connects to a server, how does it verify that the server is the one it claims to be? How do they decide on a shared secret key to use for encryption? In this chapter, we will see how these questions are commonly addressed.

We will cover the following topics:

  • Securing web-based applications using certificates
  • Key exchange using the Diffie-Hellman method