The non-profit organization Rust Foundation, dedicated to the development and support of the Rust language and its associated ecosystem, has launched a new initiative called Rust Innovation Lab. This initiative is designed to provide support for open projects written in Rust that are essential to the functioning of critical infrastructure elements. Rust Innovation Lab will offer financial, legal, and marketing assistance, as well as administrative support and help with project management.
The purpose of Rust Innovation Lab is to provide Rust projects with the resources they need to focus on developing their ideas without being burdened by non-development tasks and to maintain independence. One key feature of the initiative is that it will handle donation receptions and sponsor interactions on behalf of the Rust Foundation, offering tax benefits to project participants. This means that projects do not have to establish their own legal entity, open bank accounts, or handle tax reporting. The Rust Foundation will manage records and provide necessary reports for sponsors and project contributors.
The first project to be included in Rust Innovation Lab is the cryptographic library rustls, which offers Client and server implementations of the TLS1.2 and TLS1.3 protocols for Rust projects. Rustls does not have its own cryptographic primitives but instead utilizes various cryptographic providers for functions such as ECDSA algorithms, ED25519, RSA, Chacha20-Poly1305, AES128-GCM, and AES256-GCM. By default, Rustls employs the AWS-LC-RS crypto provider developed by Amazon, which is based on C++ code from the aws-lc project, a branch of the BoringSSL project (originally a Google Fork of OpenSSL). The library ring, which is partially based on BoringSSL and incorporates assembly, C++, and Rust code, is also connected to Rustls.