Re: Ada for the TLS/SSL problem?

[Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de>]

* Dmitry A. Kazakov:

> On 2016-03-16 18:42, Florian Weimer wrote:
>> * Dmitry A. Kazakov:
>>
>>> On 15/03/2016 21:47, Florian Weimer wrote:
>>>> * Peter Brooks:
>>>>
>>>>> There are still many problems turning up with TSL authentication. It's
>>>>> no particular surprise as even OpenSSL has been using C for this code.
>>>>>
>>>>> Isn't this an opportunity for Ada to really shine?
>>>>
>>>> It's really hard to write a good TLS implementation.  Ditching C gets
>>>> rid of just one class of issues (related memory safety).
>>>
>>> At least we could have a better API. GNUTLS design is quite
>>> uncomfortable to use in a "socket-select" environment.
>>
>> That's a consequence of the protocol because any write or read at the
>> application layer can result in arbitrary sequences of reads *and*
>> writes on the socket layer.  There is just no nice way to express this
>> in an API.
>
> It could have a state machine design, driven by write-ready read-ready
> events.

It's still very complicated, particularly if you want to leave buffer
management to the caller.  See Java's SSLEngine.