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“Why was Rust chosen for Libra?” in congressional hearing [video]

285 points by mgraczyk 7y ago

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
k__ 7y ago
Didn't expect a congressman to be so technical
axaxs 7y ago
I feel like this is blindly upvoted. The video is underwhelming, and doesn't come close to answering the question. That said, I'm very impressed by the congressman in the video, as it sounds like he knows what he's talking about. Wikipedia doesn't mention much about programming in his bio...
- Areading314 7y ago
  Looks like he comes from an NSA background. Have to say, I'm very heartened to see someone in congress ask such detailed technical questions about cybersecurity issues.
- amerine 7y ago
  Same. They’re grasp of the ecosystem and the involved bits of tech is exactly what more representatives needs to grasp.
- protomyth 7y ago
  The title is misleading although technically correct. They did respond just not with anything more than a "we'll get back to you". I do like the basics of his questions "who is committing code to Libra" and "why are using nightly build of Rust". I get the feeling he is not happy with it given his mention of "not how we usually did releases in the DOD" and pointing out the non-US coder. It will be interesting to see the technical response and his response to that.
  - MrMorden 7y ago
    Of course Rust is international. Windows is international; Linux is international; VMS might possibly not be international. You'd think DoD would be buying Talos systems as fast as Raptor could spit them out, given all the talk about wanting things to be made in the USA, but even those will likely have parts from dozens of countries. I don't want to knock Rep. Riggleman too hard, since knowing what Github is (let alone how to use it) puts him in the top one or two percent of Congress; but DoD is by no means a paragon of software development practice. It cares far too much about compliance for the sake of compliance and far too little about whether that compliance enables business objectives such as security or reliability. (And waivers are easy to obtain when compliance makes things better, but difficult when compliance makes things worse.)
    - epoch_100 7y ago
      In the video, Rep. Riggleman doesn't find issue with Rust being international; he instead notes that one of the primary committers to _Libra Core_ (not Rust) is Nigerian. I had a similar response to yours when I read the top-level comment, but watching the video it's clear that his issue is very much _not_ with Rust having an international development team.
      - protomyth 7y ago
        His issue is Libra having a international development (or more specifically random international development), and his issue with Rust is using the nightly builds instead of a stable release.
newshorts 7y ago
The congressman wants a job at Facebook.
- jameslevy 7y ago
  They're going to pass but encouraged him to circle back in six months.
cj 7y ago
Congressman: I was really surprised about the Rust language. So my first question is, why was the Rust language chosen as the implementation language for Libra? Do you believe it's mature enough to handle the security challenges that will affect these large cryptocurrency transactions? Facebook: [We will own & control the code.] Congressman: It looks like Libra was built on the nightly build of the Rust programming language. It's interesting because that's not how we did releases at the DoD. What features of Rust are only available in the nightly build that aren't in the official releases of Rust? Does Facebook see it as a concern that they are dependent on unofficially released features of the Rust language? Why the nightly releases? Do you see this as a function of the prototyping phase of this? Facebook: [No answer]
- itslennysfault 7y ago
  It's probably mostly just async/await, but I bet they were hoping it'd make it into stable before they launched.
  - steveklabnik 7y ago
    https://github.com/libra/libra/blob/master/scripts/nightly_features.sh https://github.com/libra/libra/blob/master/scripts/nightly_f... From Reddit: > The intention of that particular script is to eventually help us move towards eliminating the use of nightly features and limit depending on new ones so that we can eventually be on stable. Some features (like async/await) we'll need to wait until they've graduated to stable while others we should be able to make sufficient changes to stop relying on them.
- profalseidol 7y ago
  It's cool to see a congressman who has this level of software dev knowledge.
  - casefields 7y ago
    He's a Republican from Virginia. Former Air Force Intelligence Office and NSA contractor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_Riggleman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_Riggleman
tvanantwerp 7y ago
I don't think I've ever heard of a Congressman going to GitHub, poking around in some open source code, and then asking very cogent and relevant questions about it. This video is incredible if only because of that.
- krferriter 7y ago
  Yeah that's the most interesting part of this video. Good to know at least 1 person in Congress knows what "code" is and what "GitHub" is, and even more good that they're knowledgeable enough to know what Rust is, that different languages exist and may have different features and stability, and what nightly builds are. Since overseeing software and data security regulations is part of their job.
- ryanmarsh 7y ago
  Congresspeople often come from backgrounds other than law. It could have also been his aides helping with this.
  - profalseidol 7y ago
    In country, that background is acting, singing and dancing (and punching).
- pohl 7y ago
  Probably an intern on his staff did the research.
  - hnaccy 7y ago
    >Riggleman was in the Air Force for eleven years, serving as an intelligence officer. He then worked as a contractor for the National Security Agency. He may just be familiar with programming.
    - darcinc 7y ago
      Most people in the government that I've dealt with oversee projects and are really risk and contract managers. I took the question more as "why are you using a new language and nightly builds of that language." It's exactly the kind of thing that most program managers wouldn't even consider.
jasonhansel 7y ago
This congressman (or his aides) is surprisingly knowledgeable. I'm impressed with whoever thought to ask about nightly builds. Edit: for reference, this is the congressman who was accused of writing "Bigfoot erotica" during his campaign.
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  That edit took a real turn.
  - killjoywashere 7y ago
    He's a bigfoot nerd. He posted a stupid book on his instagram feed and his opponent tried to make him out like a weirdo. It would be like a candidate posting the cover of star wars fan fiction and their opponent accusing them of being a alien conspiracy theorist.
- jasonhansel 7y ago
  I really hope he invites a cryptozoologist to appear before the House.
- wdr1 7y ago
  > Edit: for reference, this is the congressman who was accused of writing "Bigfoot erotica" during his campaign. That was mostly a smear campaign by his political opponents. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/30/us/politics/bigfoot-porn.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/30/us/politics/bigfoot-porn....
bvinc 7y ago
I just tried to build libra on stable rust. At least the first thing that failed is that it's depending on futures 0.3. So it's almost certainly using async/await.
jdavis703 7y ago
This is a good question to ask, especially about the nightly builds from upstream. There have been NPM exploits targeted at crypto currency developers (e.g. the event-stream breach), so it seems FB would be placing a lot of trust in the Rust developers. This is not to say Rust maintainers are dishonest, but all it takes is one person who's authentication credentials gets comprised.
- incompatible 7y ago
  Wouldn't the same apply to practically any programming language and development tools? What if they'd chosen Microsoft Visual C++? Would that be less exploitable?
  - amarshall 7y ago
    Yes, but who runs against nightly builds of MVC++? The idea is, presumably, that nightly builds have undergone less scrutiny (partly just due to time in existence) and so if there was something it has a higher chance of being caught and reverted before a stable release.
  - Uehreka 7y ago
    With nightly builds, there’s more of a chance that a piece of malware could sneak in and get used to build a release of Libra. I’m sure the Rust maintainers would find it fairly quickly, but even within a few days there would be tons of Libra users with compromised wallets. More scrutiny goes into stable release builds than nightly builds, and more mature languages and tools have more experienced maintainers who are often (but of course, not always) better at scrutinizing releases. It’s not that MSVC++ can’t be compromised, but it’s pretty unlikely that it would be.
    - jhgg 7y ago
      I don’t think anyone actually runs nightly against what’s on the latest / master. I know at work, we use nightly rust, but we pin to a specific date release, usually when the around latest stable is cut.
  - 7y ago
twunde 7y ago
For those wondering the Congressman in question is Denver Riggleman, (R) representing VA's 5th district.
randaouser 7y ago
the rust nightly build has the ECC curve functionality. Most of the crypto related prototyping on rust requires the nightly atm. Heres hoping integration onto wide release for the sake of the crypto dev community
booleanbetrayal 7y ago
Even if it was well-rehearsed, he's earned my respect for bringing about questions that are pointedly relevant, both materially and topically.
hsaliak 7y ago
This is a deeply technical and insightful question to ask. However, is this question on implementation detail the best question he could ask to determine the impact of Libra on the people he represents, or does it serve to satisfy his curiosity?
- killjoywashere 7y ago
  He is their elected representative. Is there a measurable difference? Should there be a measurable difference?
- Lowkeyloki 7y ago
  I agree that unless the point of the question was more of a power move to show he's not an idiot and that they shouldn't try jerking him around, the question doesn't seem particularly useful. The action of creating Libra could be interpreted as an attempt to undermine US federal currency. Facebook is the first company with enough clout to actually succeed at widespread cryptocurrency adoption to attempt something like this. I think there are bigger issues to deal with than quibbling about languages and release cycles. I know that the congressman's unspoken question is really whether Facebook has considered the security ramifications of allowing foreign nation-states to meddle directly with our system of currency like they were able to meddle with our news media, etc. But we all know that great programs can be written in terrible languages and terrible programs can be written in great languages. If the congressman is thinking what I think he's thinking, I wish he'd come out and say it instead of beating around the bush.
derefr 7y ago
Is there a reason that it matters what the reference implementation of Libra is written in? A blockchain network is usually not considered healthy until it has multiple implementations of nodes running non-negligible parts of the network. I would say that Libra having such alternate impls is almost inevitable. Exploiting any flaw in a particular blockchain node impl, when there are multiple such impls, would then require either finding the same vulnerability in all other clients; or else, attacking that one client, forcing a hard fork, and then having that client’s version of events “win” such that other node software choose to adopt it by hardcoding a switchover. Neither is ever very likely.
- fourier_mode 7y ago
  > Is there a reason that it matters what the reference implementation of Libra is written in? If a language implementation is new, then it is (in the pragmatic sense) more susceptible to security issues.
  - voxl 7y ago
    Two counters: 1. You entirely ignored the thesis of the comment you responded to. Which is that other nodes can be implemented in more "mature" languages. 2. I don't buy for a second that new languages are more susceptible. You can attach pragmatic all you want to the sentiment but it's not an argument.
172742451 7y ago
I was dispointed by the facebook side, they should answer the question in details.
m0zg 7y ago
There's hope for Congress after all. We can now be sure we have at least one congressman there who can tell a nightly build from a hole in the ground. It's very unusual to see congressional inquiry where the person _asking_ questions is more competent than the person(s) answering them. Most congress(men|women) struggle to complete coherent sentences, let alone talk about anything technically sophisticated.
phlip9 7y ago
https://github.com/perfectmak/libra-core https://github.com/perfectmak/libra-core It seems the Congressman mistook an unofficial 3rd-party js repo whose author is Nigerian as an official Libra project...
cookieswumchorr 7y ago
I spent several minutes looking at the video for signs of editing, believing that's a joke do demonstrate some new kind of deepfake AI. I have no idea who those guys are, but it is astonishing to see politicians being competent in technology outside of MS-Word power user level

285 points by mgraczyk 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

k__ 7y ago

Didn't expect a congressman to be so technical

axaxs 7y ago

I feel like this is blindly upvoted. The video is underwhelming, and doesn't come close to answering the question. That said, I'm very impressed by the congressman in the video, as it sounds like he knows what he's talking about. Wikipedia doesn't mention much about programming in his bio...

Areading314 7y ago
Looks like he comes from an NSA background. Have to say, I'm very heartened to see someone in congress ask such detailed technical questions about cybersecurity issues.
amerine 7y ago
Same. They’re grasp of the ecosystem and the involved bits of tech is exactly what more representatives needs to grasp.
protomyth 7y ago
The title is misleading although technically correct. They did respond just not with anything more than a "we'll get back to you". I do like the basics of his questions "who is committing code to Libra" and "why are using nightly build of Rust". I get the feeling he is not happy with it given his mention of "not how we usually did releases in the DOD" and pointing out the non-US coder. It will be interesting to see the technical response and his response to that.
- MrMorden 7y ago
  Of course Rust is international. Windows is international; Linux is international; VMS might possibly not be international. You'd think DoD would be buying Talos systems as fast as Raptor could spit them out, given all the talk about wanting things to be made in the USA, but even those will likely have parts from dozens of countries. I don't want to knock Rep. Riggleman too hard, since knowing what Github is (let alone how to use it) puts him in the top one or two percent of Congress; but DoD is by no means a paragon of software development practice. It cares far too much about compliance for the sake of compliance and far too little about whether that compliance enables business objectives such as security or reliability. (And waivers are easy to obtain when compliance makes things better, but difficult when compliance makes things worse.)
  - epoch_100 7y ago
    In the video, Rep. Riggleman doesn't find issue with Rust being international; he instead notes that one of the primary committers to _Libra Core_ (not Rust) is Nigerian. I had a similar response to yours when I read the top-level comment, but watching the video it's clear that his issue is very much _not_ with Rust having an international development team.
    - protomyth 7y ago
      His issue is Libra having a international development (or more specifically random international development), and his issue with Rust is using the nightly builds instead of a stable release.

newshorts 7y ago

The congressman wants a job at Facebook.

jameslevy 7y ago
They're going to pass but encouraged him to circle back in six months.

cj 7y ago

Congressman: I was really surprised about the Rust language. So my first question is, why was the Rust language chosen as the implementation language for Libra? Do you believe it's mature enough to handle the security challenges that will affect these large cryptocurrency transactions? Facebook: [We will own & control the code.] Congressman: It looks like Libra was built on the nightly build of the Rust programming language. It's interesting because that's not how we did releases at the DoD. What features of Rust are only available in the nightly build that aren't in the official releases of Rust? Does Facebook see it as a concern that they are dependent on unofficially released features of the Rust language? Why the nightly releases? Do you see this as a function of the prototyping phase of this? Facebook: [No answer]

itslennysfault 7y ago
It's probably mostly just async/await, but I bet they were hoping it'd make it into stable before they launched.
- steveklabnik 7y ago
  https://github.com/libra/libra/blob/master/scripts/nightly_features.sh https://github.com/libra/libra/blob/master/scripts/nightly_f... From Reddit: > The intention of that particular script is to eventually help us move towards eliminating the use of nightly features and limit depending on new ones so that we can eventually be on stable. Some features (like async/await) we'll need to wait until they've graduated to stable while others we should be able to make sufficient changes to stop relying on them.
profalseidol 7y ago
It's cool to see a congressman who has this level of software dev knowledge.
- casefields 7y ago
  He's a Republican from Virginia. Former Air Force Intelligence Office and NSA contractor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_Riggleman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_Riggleman

tvanantwerp 7y ago

I don't think I've ever heard of a Congressman going to GitHub, poking around in some open source code, and then asking very cogent and relevant questions about it. This video is incredible if only because of that.

krferriter 7y ago
Yeah that's the most interesting part of this video. Good to know at least 1 person in Congress knows what "code" is and what "GitHub" is, and even more good that they're knowledgeable enough to know what Rust is, that different languages exist and may have different features and stability, and what nightly builds are. Since overseeing software and data security regulations is part of their job.
ryanmarsh 7y ago
Congresspeople often come from backgrounds other than law. It could have also been his aides helping with this.
- profalseidol 7y ago
  In country, that background is acting, singing and dancing (and punching).
pohl 7y ago
Probably an intern on his staff did the research.
- hnaccy 7y ago
  >Riggleman was in the Air Force for eleven years, serving as an intelligence officer. He then worked as a contractor for the National Security Agency. He may just be familiar with programming.
  - darcinc 7y ago
    Most people in the government that I've dealt with oversee projects and are really risk and contract managers. I took the question more as "why are you using a new language and nightly builds of that language." It's exactly the kind of thing that most program managers wouldn't even consider.

jasonhansel 7y ago

This congressman (or his aides) is surprisingly knowledgeable. I'm impressed with whoever thought to ask about nightly builds. Edit: for reference, this is the congressman who was accused of writing "Bigfoot erotica" during his campaign.

ceejayoz 7y ago
That edit took a real turn.
- killjoywashere 7y ago
  He's a bigfoot nerd. He posted a stupid book on his instagram feed and his opponent tried to make him out like a weirdo. It would be like a candidate posting the cover of star wars fan fiction and their opponent accusing them of being a alien conspiracy theorist.
jasonhansel 7y ago
I really hope he invites a cryptozoologist to appear before the House.
wdr1 7y ago
> Edit: for reference, this is the congressman who was accused of writing "Bigfoot erotica" during his campaign. That was mostly a smear campaign by his political opponents. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/30/us/politics/bigfoot-porn.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/30/us/politics/bigfoot-porn....

bvinc 7y ago

I just tried to build libra on stable rust. At least the first thing that failed is that it's depending on futures 0.3. So it's almost certainly using async/await.

jdavis703 7y ago

This is a good question to ask, especially about the nightly builds from upstream. There have been NPM exploits targeted at crypto currency developers (e.g. the event-stream breach), so it seems FB would be placing a lot of trust in the Rust developers. This is not to say Rust maintainers are dishonest, but all it takes is one person who's authentication credentials gets comprised.

incompatible 7y ago
Wouldn't the same apply to practically any programming language and development tools? What if they'd chosen Microsoft Visual C++? Would that be less exploitable?
- amarshall 7y ago
  Yes, but who runs against nightly builds of MVC++? The idea is, presumably, that nightly builds have undergone less scrutiny (partly just due to time in existence) and so if there was something it has a higher chance of being caught and reverted before a stable release.
- Uehreka 7y ago
  With nightly builds, there’s more of a chance that a piece of malware could sneak in and get used to build a release of Libra. I’m sure the Rust maintainers would find it fairly quickly, but even within a few days there would be tons of Libra users with compromised wallets. More scrutiny goes into stable release builds than nightly builds, and more mature languages and tools have more experienced maintainers who are often (but of course, not always) better at scrutinizing releases. It’s not that MSVC++ can’t be compromised, but it’s pretty unlikely that it would be.
  - jhgg 7y ago
    I don’t think anyone actually runs nightly against what’s on the latest / master. I know at work, we use nightly rust, but we pin to a specific date release, usually when the around latest stable is cut.
- 7y ago

twunde 7y ago

For those wondering the Congressman in question is Denver Riggleman, (R) representing VA's 5th district.

randaouser 7y ago

the rust nightly build has the ECC curve functionality. Most of the crypto related prototyping on rust requires the nightly atm. Heres hoping integration onto wide release for the sake of the crypto dev community

booleanbetrayal 7y ago

Even if it was well-rehearsed, he's earned my respect for bringing about questions that are pointedly relevant, both materially and topically.

hsaliak 7y ago

This is a deeply technical and insightful question to ask. However, is this question on implementation detail the best question he could ask to determine the impact of Libra on the people he represents, or does it serve to satisfy his curiosity?

killjoywashere 7y ago
He is their elected representative. Is there a measurable difference? Should there be a measurable difference?
Lowkeyloki 7y ago
I agree that unless the point of the question was more of a power move to show he's not an idiot and that they shouldn't try jerking him around, the question doesn't seem particularly useful. The action of creating Libra could be interpreted as an attempt to undermine US federal currency. Facebook is the first company with enough clout to actually succeed at widespread cryptocurrency adoption to attempt something like this. I think there are bigger issues to deal with than quibbling about languages and release cycles. I know that the congressman's unspoken question is really whether Facebook has considered the security ramifications of allowing foreign nation-states to meddle directly with our system of currency like they were able to meddle with our news media, etc. But we all know that great programs can be written in terrible languages and terrible programs can be written in great languages. If the congressman is thinking what I think he's thinking, I wish he'd come out and say it instead of beating around the bush.

derefr 7y ago

Is there a reason that it matters what the reference implementation of Libra is written in? A blockchain network is usually not considered healthy until it has multiple implementations of nodes running non-negligible parts of the network. I would say that Libra having such alternate impls is almost inevitable. Exploiting any flaw in a particular blockchain node impl, when there are multiple such impls, would then require either finding the same vulnerability in all other clients; or else, attacking that one client, forcing a hard fork, and then having that client’s version of events “win” such that other node software choose to adopt it by hardcoding a switchover. Neither is ever very likely.

fourier_mode 7y ago
> Is there a reason that it matters what the reference implementation of Libra is written in? If a language implementation is new, then it is (in the pragmatic sense) more susceptible to security issues.
- voxl 7y ago
  Two counters: 1. You entirely ignored the thesis of the comment you responded to. Which is that other nodes can be implemented in more "mature" languages. 2. I don't buy for a second that new languages are more susceptible. You can attach pragmatic all you want to the sentiment but it's not an argument.

172742451 7y ago

I was dispointed by the facebook side, they should answer the question in details.

m0zg 7y ago

There's hope for Congress after all. We can now be sure we have at least one congressman there who can tell a nightly build from a hole in the ground. It's very unusual to see congressional inquiry where the person _asking_ questions is more competent than the person(s) answering them. Most congress(men|women) struggle to complete coherent sentences, let alone talk about anything technically sophisticated.

phlip9 7y ago

https://github.com/perfectmak/libra-core https://github.com/perfectmak/libra-core It seems the Congressman mistook an unofficial 3rd-party js repo whose author is Nigerian as an official Libra project...

cookieswumchorr 7y ago

I spent several minutes looking at the video for signs of editing, believing that's a joke do demonstrate some new kind of deepfake AI. I have no idea who those guys are, but it is astonishing to see politicians being competent in technology outside of MS-Word power user level