RiB Newsletter #40

October 05, 2022

Welcome to the #40 edition of Rust in Blockchain, the monthly newsletter about Rust, distributed systems, cryptography, and other industry topics. Previous: #39.

Thanks

Thanks to contributors: Christopher Goes, dandanlen, djddo, Hadi Hosseini, Hunter Trujillo, Mike C, 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…

spiral-rs.

Spiral is a library for private information retrieval via fully homomorphic encryption composition, or “PIR via FHE composition”, described in 2021 in “Spiral: Fast, High-Rate Single-Server PIR via FHE Composition”. It allows an untrusted server to perform database queries without revealing which data is being requested.

There are two live demonstrations: Spiral Block Explorer, which appears to be a fully-developed product, and Wikipedia over Spiral, a research demo.

Interesting Things

News

Wormhole Bug Bounty Pre-Release Program Launch

Blog Posts

Smart Contract Development — Move vs. Rust
First impressions of the Move programming language
Sin7Y Tech Review(30): Thoughts on removing Memory constraints in the ZKEVM
Ed25519 Deep Dive Addendum
Zero Knowledge Canon, part 1 & 2
Area-52: Save the Cosmos While Learning CosmWasm and Rust Smart Contracts
Execution and Parallelism for DAG-Based BFT Consensus
BFT on a DAG. A description of recent consensus protocols that perform local ordering of DAGs for high throughput, as exemplified by Narwhal (used by the Sui blockchain).
ZK White Paper: Efficient ZK Proofs for Keccak
SNARK Security and Performance
Trustless Bridging II: Byzantine Fault Tolerance
The Rise of Fully Homomorphic Encryption

Papers

Projects

Triton VM. A virtual machine that comes with Algebraic Execution Tables (AET) and Arithmetic Intermediate Representations (AIR) for use in combination with a STARK proof system.
Taiga. A framework for generalized shielded state transitions.
Circomspect. A static analyzer and linter for the Circom programming language.
Spiral Block Explorer. A public block explorer that uses homomorphic encryption to look up addresses without revealing them, using spiral-rs.
huff-snark-verifier. An optimized Groth16 SNARK verification smart contract generator for EVM-based blockchains.

Security Advisories

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

RUSTSEC-2022-0054: wee_alloc - Unmaintained.
- This allocator has often been used for wasm targets. It has memory leaks. Modern Rust uses dlmalloc-rs by default on wasm and is fine for most purposes.
RUSTSEC-2022-0055: axum-core - Vulnerability in axum-core.
RUSTSEC-2022-0056: clipboard - Unmaintained.
RUSTSEC-2022-0057: badge - Unmaintained.
CVE-2022-36114: cargo - Cargo extracting malicious crates can fill the file system.
CVE-2022-36113: cargo - Cargo extracting malicious crates can corrupt arbitrary files.
CVE-2022-36086: linked_list_allocator - Vulnerable to out-of-bound writes on Heap initialization and Heap::extend.
CVE-2022-39215: tauri - readDir Endpoint Scope can be Bypassed With Symbolic Links.
GHSA-v8gq-5grq-9728: mozjpeg - DecompressScanlines::read_scanlines is Unsound.
GHSA-p75v-367r-2v23: cell-project - used incorrect variance when projecting through &Cell<T>.
CVE-2022-39974: wasm3 - WASM3 Improper Input Validation vulnerability.
GHSA-28r9-pq4c-wp3c: personnummer - vulnerable to Improper Input Validation.
CVE-2022-39252: matrix-sdk-crypto - Contains potential impersonation via room key forward responses.

Most Active in September

Aptos: 725 merged PRs, 117 closed issues, 27 open issues

Parity: 459 merged PRs, 175 closed issues, 150 open issues

Solana: 429 merged PRs, 63 closed issues, 73 open issues

Sui: 332 merged PRs, 84 closed issues, 103 open issues

Fuel: 283 merged PRs, 190 closed issues, 146 open issues

Project Updates

Aleo

76 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4), 41 closed issues (1, 2, 3, 4), 42 open issues (1, 2, 3, 4)

Anoma

45 merged PRs (1, 2), 20 closed issues (1), 54 open issues (1, 2)

Aptos

725 merged PRs (1), 117 closed issues (1), 27 open issues (1)

Casper

37 merged PRs (1, 2), 44 closed issues (1, 2), 14 open issues (1, 2)

ChainSafe

74 merged PRs (1, 2), 38 closed issues (1, 2), 27 open issues (1)

How Does The Mina Protocol Achieve Consensus?

COMIT

4 merged PRs (1, 2), 0 closed issues, 0 open issues

Concordium

62 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4), 27 closed issues (1, 2, 3), 13 open issues (1, 2, 3)

Conflux

13 merged PRs (1), 1 closed issues (1), 1 open issues (1)

DarkFi

5 merged PRs (1), 4 closed issues (1), 0 open issues

Dfinity

94 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7), 11 closed issues (1, 2, 3), 7 open issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

Dusk Network

21 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), 17 closed issues (1, 2, 3), 6 open issues (1, 2)

Elrond

42 merged PRs (1, 2), 0 closed issues, 1 open issues (1)

Espresso Systems

11 merged PRs (1, 2, 3), 16 closed issues (1, 2, 3), 6 open issues (1, 2, 3, 4)

Filecoin

129 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7), 55 closed issues (1, 2, 3, 4), 59 open issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

Findora

43 merged PRs (1, 2, 3), 1 closed issues (1), 2 open issues (1)

Release v0.3.30 Is on Anvil Testnet

Fluence

82 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), 11 closed issues (1), 2 open issues (1, 2)

Fuel

283 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13), 190 closed issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11), 146 open issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9)

Golem

22 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), 25 closed issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), 25 open issues (1, 2, 3, 4)

Grin

1 merged PRs (1), 2 closed issues (1), 2 open issues (1, 2)

Helium

14 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4), 8 closed issues (1, 2), 2 open issues (1)

Holochain

48 merged PRs (1, 2), 7 closed issues (1, 2), 16 open issues (1, 2)

Gossip Performance Improvements

IOTA

205 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8), 71 closed issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), 21 open issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

Maidsafe

51 merged PRs (1, 2, 3), 1 closed issues (1), 0 open issues

MobileCoin

64 merged PRs (1, 2), 9 closed issues (1), 16 open issues (1)

NEAR

194 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10), 92 closed issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), 52 open issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8)

Nervos

55 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8), 10 closed issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), 9 open issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

A Journey to the Absolute Limit: CKB-VM’s LLVM AOT engine

Oasis

9 merged PRs (1), 1 closed issues (1), 0 open issues

Parity

459 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15), 175 closed issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13), 150 open issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13)

Radix

31 merged PRs (1, 2), 1 closed issues (1), 3 open issues (1)

Secret Network

41 merged PRs (1, 2, 3), 47 closed issues (1, 2, 3), 2 open issues (1)

Shockwave Delta Mainnet Upgrade is Complete!

Solana

429 merged PRs (1, 2), 63 closed issues (1, 2, 3), 73 open issues (1, 2, 3)

Beginners guide to Solana NFTs in Rust

Subspace Labs

33 merged PRs (1), 8 closed issues (1), 9 open issues (1)

Gemini II Incentivized Testnet goes LIVE next week!

Sui

332 merged PRs (1, 2), 84 closed issues (1, 2), 103 open issues (1, 2)

Zcash

105 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4), 55 closed issues (1, 2, 3), 40 open issues (1, 2, 3, 4)

Rust in Bitcoin

The Spiral project was published and is a very exciting implementation of a public block explorer that can keep addresses looked up private using homomorphic encryption. The Fedimint team is growing, BDK and LDK continue to make progress, in addition to the teams working on various RGB projects. BDK has released a new blog post detailing their intention to stabilize the API and mark a 1.0 release. It was an auspicious month for prolific Rust Bitcoin developer Dr. Maxim Orlovsky, as his contribution to the Bitcoin Improvement Proposals was accepted as BIP-372: Pay-to-contract tweak fields for PSBT which outlines how pay-to-contract fields can be encoded in PSBTs.

This month, the following projects were added to the running list of Rust in Bitcoin projects kept in a pinned message in the Telegram group:

For discussion join the Rust in Bitcoin Telegram group.