● Covered by 1 source · 1 reportMedium impact1 neutral
Rustls Celebrates 10th Anniversary, Details Evolution, Benchmarks, and Future Plans
Key points
- Rustls celebrated its 10th anniversary, detailing its evolution and roadmap.
- The project evolved from grassroots to a sustainably funded open-source initiative.
- Rustls 0.23.37 outperforms OpenSSL and BoringSSL in most handshake and throughput benchmarks.
- The upcoming 0.24 release will introduce significant architectural changes.
A Decade of Development
Rustls, a Transport Layer Security (TLS) library written in Rust, recently celebrated its tenth anniversary. The project, initiated in May 2016, rapidly achieved broad site interoperability and released version 0.1.0 later that year. Over the past decade, external contributions and funding from organizations like the Internet Security Research Group’s (ISRG) Prossimo initiative and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have supported its development.
Maturity and Funding
The development process for Rustls has matured from a grassroots effort by independent contributors to a sustainably funded open-source project with dedicated maintainers. This financial backing has enabled full-time work on robustness, architectural refactoring, and compliance features, including post-quantum cryptography, FIPS certification, and Encrypted ClientHello. Third-party audits by Cure53, backed by CNCF, have also contributed to its security.
Performance Benchmarks
Recent benchmarks comparing Rustls (version 0.23.37) against OpenSSL (version 3.6.1) and BoringSSL on x86_64 architectures show Rustls performing 2,357 full handshakes per second per core, which is 1.38 times faster than OpenSSL and 1.82 times faster than BoringSSL. For resumed handshakes, Rustls achieved 7,249 per second per core, surpassing BoringSSL (1.28x slower) and OpenSSL (1.92x slower).
In terms of throughput, Rustls received 7,333 megabytes per second per core, outperforming OpenSSL and BoringSSL (both 1.18x slower). For data sent, BoringSSL marginally led with 7,565 megabytes per second per core (1.02x faster than Rustls), while Rustls processed 7,421 megabytes per second per core, beating OpenSSL (1.27x slower).
Future Roadmap
The project's current 0.23 release line has maintained stability with numerous non-breaking updates, a consistency noted by developers. Building on this foundation, the upcoming 0.24 release is planned to introduce significant architectural changes.
✨ This summary was generated by AI from the outlets' reporting listed below. It is not independently verified and may contain errors — check the original sources. How BrevFeed works →
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Primary sources
GitHub rustls/rustlsReporting from
Rustls, the Rust-based TLS library, marked its tenth anniversary by releasing a retrospective on its development, community growth, and future roadmap. Benchmarks show Rustls outperforming OpenSSL and BoringSSL in full and resumed handshakes, and in data received throughput, while being marginally slower in data sent throughput compared to BoringSSL.