RiB Newsletter #41

November 02, 2022

Welcome to the #41 edition of Rust in Blockchain, the monthly newsletter about Rust, distributed systems, cryptography, and other industry topics. Previous: #40.

Thanks

Thanks to contributors: djddo, Hunter Trujillo, maxim, 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…

tlock-rs and zk-timelock.

These projects, both by the same author, implement timelock encryption, by which data can be encrypted and then only decrypted after a certain moment. It relies on the drand randomness beacon.

Interesting Things

Blog Posts

Blockchain Consensus Mechanisms Compared. Just an easy to understand basic overview.
Creating wasm-opt Rust bindings with cxx
Introducing Noir: The Universal Language of Zero-Knowledge. We have spotlighted this project previously.
Polygon zkEVM Architecture
MEV Resistance on a DAG. A good explanation of the new generation of high-throughput DAG-based consensus protocols like Narwhal / Tusk. This one introduces Fino.
Secure Randomness: From Zero to Verifiable Delay Functions, Part 1
Public Randomness and Randomness Beacons
Explained: The BNB Chain Hack (October 2022)
Security Analysis of Avalanche Consensus
Beyond IBC
Major New Cryptowatch Desktop Trading Release using fast Rust-native GUI Framework

Papers

Projects

Cartesi Rollups. It contains the on-chain and off-chain pieces that are used to deploy, launch and interact with Cartesi Rollups DApps.
zkcreds-rs. A cryptographic library for designing anonymous credential systems in a flexible, issuer-agnostic, and efficient manner using general-purpose zero-knowledge proofs.
zk-timelock. Arkworks circuits for verifiable time-lock encryption.
rs-tlock. Pure Rust implementation of drand/tlock scheme. It provides time-based encryption and decryption capabilities by relying on a drand threshold network and identity-based encryption (IBE).
fastcrypto. MystenLabs’ crypto library.

Security Advisories

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

RUSTSEC-2022-0058: inconceivable - Security notice.
RUSTSEC-2022-0059: openssl-src - Vulnerability. Related to custom ciphers.
RUSTSEC-2022-0060: orbtk - Unmaintained.
RUSTSEC-2022-0061: parity-wasm - Unmaintained. Parity is switching to wasm-tools.
RUSTSEC-2022-0062: matrix-sdk - Vulnerability.
RUSTSEC-2022-0063: linked_list_allocator - Vulnerability.
RUSTSEC-2022-0064: openssl-src - Vulnerability. Buffer overflow from email parsing during authentication.
RUSTSEC-2022-0065: openssl-src - Vulnerability. Buffer overflow during certificate verification
RUSTSEC-2022-0066: conduit-hyper - Vulnerability.
CVE-2021-21235: kamadak-exif vulnerable to Infinite loop when parsing PNG files.
CVE-2022-3929: slack-morphism - Exposure of sensitive Slack webhook URLs in debug logs and traces.
CVE-2022-39354: evm - Incorrect is_static parameter for custom stateful precompiles in SputnikVM.

Most Active in October

Sui: 433 merged PRs, 193 closed issues, 119 open issues

Parity: 423 merged PRs, 256 closed issues, 118 open issues

Solana: 423 merged PRs, 86 closed issues, 73 open issues

Aptos: 381 merged PRs, 52 closed issues, 93 open issues

Fuel: 316 merged PRs, 236 closed issues, 143 open issues

Project Updates

Aleo

74 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4), 26 closed issues (1, 2, 3, 4), 21 open issues (1, 2, 3, 4)

Anoma

130 merged PRs (1, 2, 3), 50 closed issues (1, 2, 3), 42 open issues (1, 2, 3)

Aptos

381 merged PRs (1), 52 closed issues (1), 93 open issues (1)

Casper

15 merged PRs (1, 2), 31 closed issues (1, 2), 15 open issues (1, 2)

COMIT

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

Concordium

70 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), 36 closed issues (1, 2, 3, 4), 12 open issues (1, 2, 3, 4)

Conflux

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

DarkFi

8 merged PRs (1), 11 closed issues (1), 0 open issues

Dfinity

64 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), 105 closed issues (1, 2, 3), 5 open issues (1, 2, 3, 4)

Building Effective Rust Canister Smart Contracts: Useful Patterns

Dusk Network

15 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), 7 closed issues (1, 2, 3), 12 open issues (1, 2, 3)

Elrond

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

Espresso Systems

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

Filecoin

195 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7), 107 closed issues (1, 2, 3), 98 open issues (1, 2, 3, 4)

Findora

98 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), 6 closed issues (1), 0 open issues

EVM Privacy with Findora

Fluence

67 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), 4 closed issues (1), 0 open issues

Fuel

316 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12), 236 closed issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10), 143 open issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8)

Golem

26 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), 37 closed issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), 18 open issues (1, 2, 3)

Grin

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

Helium

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

Holochain

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

IOTA

102 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7), 38 closed issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), 20 open issues (1, 2, 3, 4)

Maidsafe

54 merged PRs (1, 2, 3), 1 closed issues (1), 7 open issues (1, 2, 3, 4)

MobileCoin

68 merged PRs (1, 2), 15 closed issues (1), 20 open issues (1)

NEAR

203 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9), 42 closed issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7), 59 open issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

Nervos

69 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9), 8 closed issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), 19 open issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

Oasis

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

Parity

423 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15), 256 closed issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13), 118 open issues (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13)

Polkadot: Blockspace over Blockchains

Radix

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

Secret Network

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

Secret 2.0: Building The Next Generation of Web3 Privacy

Solana

423 merged PRs (1, 2), 86 closed issues (1, 2), 73 open issues (1, 2, 3)

Subspace Labs

30 merged PRs (1), 14 closed issues (1), 8 open issues (1)

Sui

433 merged PRs (1, 2), 193 closed issues (1, 2), 119 open issues (1)

Zcash

104 merged PRs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), 61 closed issues (1, 2, 3, 4), 35 open issues (1, 2, 3, 4)

Rust in Bitcoin

It’s been a crazy month in the Bitcoin space. In light of the mayhem happening on LND, it bears mentioning there are two Rust Lightning implementations, LNP and LDK, activity on both listed below. In lighter news, Iris wallet, an Android Bitcoin wallet that supports RGB tokens was released, and it makes use of rgb-lib, behind Kotlin language bindings using rust-ffi. LDK released 0.0.112, a largely incremental release to meet expanding use-cases as the project matures. BDK 0.23 was released shortly after last newsletter, and they’re now gearing up for a 0.24 release containing support for rust-bitcoin 0.29, as mentioned in RiB #39. The Fedimint team is working hard on new features, including an experimental web interface, and a 2nd-generation key generation system based on discrete-log cryptography, which should be more secure. Finally, bitmask-core 0.4 was published, with support for Taproot P2TR addresses, and also LNDHub support.

For discussion join the Rust in Bitcoin Telegram group.