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December 18, 2024
Power consumption of an experimental webserver
This article was authored by Jordy Aaldering and Folkert de Vries
Over the past couple of months, we teamed up with Bernard van Gastel and Jordy Aaldering at Radboud University's Software Energy Lab to measure nea's energy efficiency.
December 6, 2024
Travelling to the land of the rising sun with Statime
At the beginning of October, David and I went to ISPCS in Tokyo. The ISPCS (IEEE Symposium on Precision Clock Synchronization) is all about the PTP protocol and related technologies, and we attended because of Statime, our Rust implementation of the Precision Time Protocol.
November 25, 2024
Manipulating time through (S)NTP
The NTP protocol is used by many devices to synchronize their system clocks. However, many devices use SNTP clients (Simple NTP) which are even more vulnerable to interference. As most (S)NTP packets are unauthenticated, they are vulnerable to spoofing, making it possible to change a device's time by manipulating (S)NTP packets.
In this blog, we discuss how (S)NTP packets can be forged to manipulate a device's system clock. Especially on the default SNTP client for many Linux systems, this turned out to be very easy. We will also dicuss the consequences of such attacks, as well as how these attacks can be prevented.
November 13, 2024
Rust implementation of OpenADR 3.0 becomes part of OpenLEADR
OpenLEADR development is ramping up again with a new Rust implementation of OpenADR 3.0 becoming part of the OpenLEADR project.
November 12, 2024
Rust needs an official specification
Can we currently reason about Rust code with absolute certainty? Not really, but we should be able to. In this article, we dive into the reasons why it may be time for a Rust specification.
October 30, 2024
Enabling pools in NTS
We previously talked about how secure time is required for a safe internet. We mentioned how we want to increase the adoption of NTS, the secure time synchronization standard built on top of NTP. For this, we proposed to develop a public NTS pool. In this article, we expand on what pooling is, and what is required to enable an NTS pool.
October 7, 2024
Rust is rolling off the Volvo assembly line
In my job I get to speak to lots of people about Rust. Some are just starting out, some have barely ever heard of it, and then some people are running Rust silently in production at a very large company in a very serious product.
Our Statime project now provides strong synchronization performance and accurate synchronization error estimates without manual tuning for any specific hardware, because it automatically determines the main uncertainty parameters for a Kalman-based clock servo. This process is described in a scientific paper, soon to be published by the IEEE.
September 30, 2024
Rust interop in practice: speaking Python and Javascript
September 17, 2024
Mix in Rust with C++
This article will help you to slowly introduce some Rust into your C++ project. We'll familiarize ourselves with the tooling and go through some examples.
August 27, 2024
Mix in Rust with Python: PyO3
In this article, we'll dive into combining Rust with Python. Specifically, this post covers calling modules written in Rust from Python scripts.
August 26, 2024
Current zlib-rs performance
Our
zlib-rs project implements a drop-in replacement for libz.so, a dynamic library that is widely used to perform gzip (de)compression.July 15, 2024
Mix in C with Rust: A taste of C in your Rust
Can't wait to learn how to call C code from your Rust project after reading my previous posts about Rust interop in general and calling Rust from C? Good! If you haven't read those yet, please do, because I'm going to assume you have in this article. We've seen the basics of Rust's FFI, and have experimented with calling Rust from C. Going the other way around, you'll walk into much the same challenges.
The other day I came across Diplomat, an opinionated tool that makes a lot of choices for you. If you've read my previous post in this series, you'll have seen that that can be quite valuable. If you haven't read the previous article yet, do so before continuing to read this one, as it'll help you appreciate the concepts in this post, and it introduces the example as well.
July 8, 2024
Statime vs Linux PTP: Comparison of precision
As part of the development of our Precision Time Protocol implementation, Statime, we want to know how it performs compared to other implementations of PTP.
To figure this out, last April we visited VSL, the Dutch National Metrology Institute. There, we performed comparitive precision tests between Statime and Linux PTP.
June 24, 2024
Will Rust be alive in 10 years?
Will Rust still exist, and have proper support, 10, 20 or even 30 years from now? We’ve been asked this question multiple times in the last year. It is a fair question, as adopting any new technology requires an investment and comes with uncertainties, one of them being the durability of the technology. This article explains why we expect Rust to stand the test of time.
June 18, 2024
Want more Rust? Break the cycle!
Let's be frank: Rust is a cool language, but there's not a chance I'm introducing it in my company if I can't get any engineers for it. We'll stick with technologies with a much healthier job market.
June 10, 2024
Tock binary size
Tock is a powerful and secure embedded operating system. While Tock was designed with resource constraints in mind, years of additional features, generalizing to more platforms, and security improvements have brought resource, and in particular, code size bloat.
June 7, 2024
Authentication for PTP
PTP was originally designed for networks in which all devices were ultimately trusted. In version 1, no security mechanism was present, and version 2 only provided an experimental mechanism. However, with version 2.1 of the PTP standard (IEEE 1588-2019) there is now a normative security mechanism in section 16.14.
June 7, 2024
Mix in Rust with C
So, you've just read my previous post on Rust interoperability in general, and now you're curious about how to actually apply the concepts to your situation. You've come to the right place, because in this post and the two that follow, I'll demonstrate how to make Rust and C talk to each other.