Book Image

Rust Web Programming - Second Edition

By : Maxwell Flitton
Book Image

Rust Web Programming - Second Edition

By: Maxwell Flitton

Overview of this book

Are safety and high performance a big concern for you while developing web applications? With this practical Rust book, you’ll discover how you can implement Rust on the web to achieve the desired performance and security as you learn techniques and tooling to build fully operational web apps. In this second edition, you’ll get hands-on with implementing emerging Rust web frameworks, including Actix, Rocket, and Hyper. It also features HTTPS configuration on AWS when deploying a web application and introduces you to Terraform for automating the building of web infrastructure on AWS. What’s more, this edition also covers advanced async topics. Built on the Tokio async runtime, this explores TCP and framing, implementing async systems with the actor framework, and queuing tasks on Redis to be consumed by a number of worker nodes. Finally, you’ll go over best practices for packaging Rust servers in distroless Rust Docker images with database drivers, so your servers are a total size of 50Mb each. By the end of this book, you’ll have confidence in your skills to build robust, functional, and scalable web applications from scratch.
Table of Contents (27 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Part 1:Getting Started with Rust Web Development
4
Part 2:Processing Data and Managing Displays
8
Part 3:Data Persistence
12
Part 4:Testing and Deployment
16
Part 5:Making Our Projects Flexible
19
Part 6:Exploring Protocol Programming and Async Concepts with Low-Level Network Applications

Authenticating our users

When it comes to authenticating our users, we have built a struct that extracts a message from the header of the HTTP request. We are now at the stage where we can make real use of this extraction by storing data about the user in the header. Right now, there is nothing stopping us from storing the username, ID, and password in the header of each HTTP request so that we can authenticate each one. However, this is a terrible practice. If someone intercepts the request or gets hold of the data stored in the browser to facilitate this, then the account is compromised and the hacker can do whatever they want. Instead, we are going to obfuscate the data, as shown in the following figure:

Figure 7.5 – Steps for authenticating requests

Figure 7.5 – Steps for authenticating requests

In Figure 7.5, we can see that we use a secret key to serialize the structured data that we have on the user into a token that is in bytes. We then give the token to the user to store in the browser...