Last night, I was planning to do some web development, and when I created my new VPS, I just felt like it was quite a tedious process either manually copying-pasting SSL certs around or deploying CertBot to allocate new ones for me. My life would be easier if there is some sort of SSL certificates management and distribution system.

Although I didn't really search these keywords on Google, I can promise that they definitely exist on the web. Nevertheless, I want to write one myself, because it has been such a long period since last time I wrote something in Rust.

It has been a long time since my last reverse engineering on macOS, and that was about Netease Cloud Music. 

But I always write that in Objective-C, perhaps I should try something different, let's say, Rust.

1. Compile a .dylib that macOS recognises
2. Build a Constructor Function that Invokes on dylib Loading
3. All I need is a dlsym
   1. Find the Symbol You Want
   2. Casting to Function Pointer
4. Compile and Hook

1. Compile a .dylib that macOS recognises

The first step is to tell cargo that what we need is a library

cargo new --lib exploit

And cargo will create these files for us.

exploit
├── Cargo.toml
└── src
    └── lib.rs

However, if we compile this project, the output library has a suffix .rlib. which suggests that this is a Rust library. Yet we need a dylib that macOS recognises.

Therefore the hint for producing a .dylib library should be added in Cargo.toml, which is shown below.

[lib]
crate-type = ["dylib"]

This tells cargo out crate type is a dylib, which satisfies the format requirements of macOS dynamic library.

Generate WebP images for JPG / PNG files on-the-fly with Rust! webp_server_rs

Speaking of switching to WebP image, at the first glance, I just did it in a very naive approach.

Then @Nova wrote a Node.JS server that can serve JPG/PNGs as WebP format on-the-fly. You can find that at n0vad3v/webp_server.

A few days ago, @Nova and @Benny rewrite the WebP Server in Golang, webp-sh/webp_server_go. 

And that looks really promising, the size of the webp server, according to its description, had greatly reduced from 43 MB to 15 MB, and it is a single binary instead of webp_server with node_modules.

I cloned that project and added a tiny feature. However, I just found that although it is absolutely easy to implement the tiny feature, there is a potential design issue with the `fasthttp` module. In order to get everything work, it took me about 4 hours to debug on it.

Finally, it turned out to be a pointer of an internal variable (ctx.Request.uri, or so) was directly returned from ctx.Path(), and if users invoke ctx.SendFile(filepath), the ctx.Request.uri will be set to filepath, which will also propagate to all variables that hold the shared value of ctx.Path(). You may visit my previous blog post for details.

Well, in aforementioned blog post, I said that it would be better if it was written in Rust. Now, let's make it come true and push the WebP server even further.

There are some comparisons among n0vad3v/webp_server, webp-sh/webp_server_go and webp_server_rs.

As for size,

• webp_server(nodejs) with node_modules takes 43 MB
• webp-server(go) has reduced to 15 MB, and it's single binary
• webp-server(Rust) pushes that even further, only 3.6 MB on macOS and 6.4 MB on Linux

In terms of convenience, you can just download the binary file and run if you choose either webp-server(go) or webp-server(Rust). However, webp_server(nodejs) requires pm2 to run.

Performance, to be honest, I haven't got time to run some benchmarks on them. But IMHO it (webp-server(Rust)) should be as fast as golang version.