RiB Newsletter #35

May 04, 2022

Welcome to the #35 edition of Rust in Blockchain, the monthly newsletter about Rust, distributed systems, cryptography, and other industry topics. Previous: #34.

This month Trail of Bits published disclosure of a class of security vulnerabilities in multiple zero-knowledge proof implementations. The four part series is a good read, though technically deep. One of the projects they audited and fixed is Dusk Network’s plonk implementation in Rust, increasing that library’s credibility.

We like hacking on many Rust blockchains, and hackathons are a great bite-sized opportunity to take a blockchain for a test-drive. This month Dfinity will be holding a hackathon, but that is the last one we have on the calendar. We’re interested in listing more hackathons in the newsletter; if you are aware of any please let us know.

Since adding a bunch of coverage last month for Rust Bitcoin projects, Hunter Trujillo has started a dedicated Rust in Bitcoin Telegram channel.

Thanks

Thanks to contributors: djddo, Genysys, Hunter Trujillo, Ilya Tegmark, keymakercasa, Max Wegman, Mikerah, Radha, Brian Anderson, and Aimee Zhu. Thank you for your help!

RiB needs help to keep up with Rust blockchain projects. If you follow a particular project, or otherwise find information that is beneficial to the Rust & blockchain community, please contribute to the next issue by submitting a PR to the next draft.

Project Spotlight

Each month we like to shine a light on a notable Rust blockchain project. This month that project is…

risc0.

risc0 is an implementation of the RISC-V instruction set that produces zero-knowledge proofs of execution. It can run arbitrary code produced by compilers of traditional languages like Rust. This would seem to make zero-knowledge proof programming more accessible to the average programmer. It was introduced in a recent blog post, and with a Battleship example that shows how to create a fair distributed game of battleship without a trusted server.

Interesting Things

News

For Rust in Bitcoin, Taproot support has landed in rust-bitcoin and rust-miniscript. In addition, the first release of the MyCitadel Wallet was published by the LNP/BP team. It’s fully written in Rust, supports hardware signers like the Ledger Nano X and BitBox, and uses GTK and Relm.

Blog Posts

Papers

Projects

StoffelMPC: A framework for building MPC as a sidechain applications for blockchains
oriac. A toy Cairo VM implementation in Rust
RISC Zero is a zero-knowledge verifiable general computing platform based on zk-STARKs and the RISC-V microarchitecture.
Vulcan Signer: Software for building an embedded PSBT signing device
Mori: A CLI descriptor-based wallet to be used to safely inherit bitcoin

Security Advisories

Monthly security advisories, from RustSec, and GitHub Advisories. Bold entries here are especially relevant to blockchain projects.

Most Active in April

Solana: 590 merged PRs, 105 closed issues, 88 open issues

Parity: 471 merged PRs, 145 closed issues, 154 open issues

NEAR: 219 merged PRs, 51 closed issues, 45 open issues

Fuel: 213 merged PRs, 145 closed issues, 134 open issues

IOTA: 187 merged PRs, 46 closed issues, 34 open issues

An Intro to the Sauron Web Framework

IC Internals: Orthogonal Persistence

Dusk Network

35 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), 39 closed issues (1, 2, 3, 4), 4 open issues (1, 2, 3)

Elrond

93 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8), 0 closed issues, 2 open issues (1, 2)

PLONK Critical Vulnerability Successfully Remediated

Holochain Dev Pulse 117: External Links

IOTA

187 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), 46 closed issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), 34 open issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

IOTA in Gaia-X 4 Future Mobility

Hashing it Out: The Highlights

Oasis

40 merged PRs (1, 2, 3), 6 closed issues (1), 5 open issues (1)

Parity

471 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15), 145 closed issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14), 154 open issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15)