rustls / rustls/rustls-ffi

allow getting more information out of errors

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#375 2 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Dominant language
Rust
Stars
170
Forks
43
Avg merge
1d 1h
Merged PRs (30d)
10

Description

This library treats all error as mappable into one big enum, mapping onto the variants of rustls::Error, with some variants exploded into multiple values (like InvalidMessage) and some elided like the Vec in InappropriateMessage and InappropriateHandshakeMessage.

One place where this falls down is the General error type, where we elide the string value. That means RUSTLS_RESULT_GENERAL loses some information. But historically there weren't many paths that returned General so this wasn't a big deal.

In rustls 0.22 there's the new OtherError variant, which passes through an arbitrary error from a cryptographic backend. This has the same problem - right now we turn it into RUSTLS_RESULT_GENERAL, which loses information.

Returning an error enum (result a u32) is very handy because there is no allocation involved. The caller can discard the value without having to worry about freeing it.

However, we should consider changing the whole error structure. Instead of returning an enum, we could return a pointer to an opaque type *rustls_err. Returning a null pointer would indicate success, while returning a non-null pointer would indicate error. There would be a method on *rustls_err to extract the string value of the error, and another method to get the top-level enum variant.

This has the downside that the caller needs to free the error once they are done processing it. However, this may not be a huge burden because C error handling flows often include a goto cleanup where any non-NULL pointers that may have been allocated during the function get freed.

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First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by tracing how rustls::Error, OtherError, and RUSTLS_RESULT_GENERAL are represented across the FFI boundary. Compare the current enum result with the proposed opaque rustls_err pointer, including string extraction and cleanup, and define the API behavior for preserving error information.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
rust
Domain
api, cryptography
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
20/100

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