Why does 10.0 pull in `rsa`, which has a vulnerability?

[dbanty]

When upgrading to 10, I picked the rust_crypto feature, thinking it would be similar to the previous behavior. cargo-deny then immediately flagged that the new version pulls in the rsa crate which has the open vulnerability RUSTSEC-2023-0071.

For now I'm sticking to 9.x because the older ring implementation didn't have that vulnerability—at least according to cargo-deny. I'm curious why the switch to using rsa over ring, and if there's any way we could bring back the ring implementation? Or did the ring implementation secretly suffer from the same problem?

I don't want to pull in aws-lc if at all possible because, at least last I checked, it's very slow to compile.

[Keats]

People wanted to use aws-lc and at some point during the development of v10, ring was unmaintained: briansmith/ring#2414 so it didn't make sense to have it.
aws-lc doesn't support wasm afaik so rust-crypto was added to keep that working for people needing it. I believe the upcoming rust-crypto version crates will mitigate that vulnerability but not 100%.

I'm expecting people to use aws-lc more in practice as it might be more in the tree if you are using https://github.com/rustls/rustls/blob/main/Cargo.toml#L46 or others

[dbanty]

Thanks for the detailed explanation! That all makes sense to me. I've been pretty aggressively avoiding aws-lc because the build times were monstrous but maybe I just need to give in and switch my rustls over too if Ring development has slowed.