November 8, 2026 · kixelated

Cryptography Slop

I’m one of the OG “rewrite it in Rust” guys. I love Rust.

Unfortunately, I wrote my last line of Rust 6 months ago. I still want Claude to write everything in Rust, but it’s difficult when rustc turns my desktop into lava.

I spent some tokens investigating on how to speed up MoQ build. One finding was that aws-lc-rs takes 60s+ to build. wtf why does a single crate take a full minute to build?

Despite the suffix, aws-lc-rs is actually a C library in disguise. Same with the next best crypto library: ring. wtf is C doing in my Rust library.

THIS WILL NOT STAND.

I did what any sane software engineer does in current_year, I pulled a 9-year old gaming PC out of the closet, installed Claude, and ran /goal rewrite it in rust *.

* and a lot of assembly

WOW FAST

rind is vibe slopped crypto.

It started as fork of Graviola and quickly morphed into a monsterish combination of ring and aws-lc-rs and libcrux.

^ This is a big deal because AES-128-GCM is the most popular TLS cipher suite by far. Even a tiny reduction in CPU usage has huge impact when multiplied across every HTTPS request in the world*.

* this benchmark is HTTP/3 specific. HTTP/1 and HTTP/2 use different payload sizes. There be a lot of variance depending on the architecture.

WOW FAST

Rust gets dunked on for compile speeds but nerds forget that C/C++ can also be terrible when uncached.

Have you ever tried to cold compile Chromium? It takes literal hours.

Most of the time these builds are cached anyway but IDK it’s still nice to see smaller number.

Wow fast

Having accomplished my goal of making MoQ faster, I let my 9-year-old gaming PC take a vacation.

lul jk I ran: /goal: Support every algorithm, and make it the fastest.

AI is really fucking good at benchmarks. It’s terrifying.

Moments like this fill me with dread as a professional software engineer. A decade ago, I wasted weeks speeding up Go’s crypto. I could have just waited a decade for Opus 5.5 instead. idiot

Lean into Lean

I saw an Anthropic blog post about formal verification. Like most programmers, I don’t even test my code, let alone formally verify it. But I figured I’d play along and waste a few more tokens chasing the dragon.

Because like, if you can prove the vibe slop is correct, it’s no longer vibe slop right?

Green boxes are formally verified, dashed are mostly formally verified.

libcrux is cool because they try to formally verify everything, but if you saw the last grid, it’s super slow. rind will only use a formal proof if the performance was within 10%, which has surprisingly decent coverage.

aes-gcm being verified on some architectures is awesome, because it’s the goat of crypto.

I’m sure we could get every algorithm formally proven. If only there was somebody in the audience works for a frontier lab and wants some easy marketting piece instead of stealing all of the glory from the mathematicians.

Please Donate Tokens

If it sounds like I’m desparate and begging for more tokens, ur right.

So I came up with a plan. I decided the best way to get tokens is to rage bait.

Bun is SUPER SLOW.
Holy shit it’s like REALLY SLOW.
Imagine doing common stuff like TLS certificate generation in Bun.
Super SLOW.

I threw Deprecated Deno in just because it uses RustCrypto. Oh man, I used to hate RustCrypto back when I was a programmer.

Did the rage bait work? Login to your work account, choose the secret model nobody else has access to, then /quest-spawn to work on the backlog I planned.

k thx

try it?

Up to you, it depends on your tolerance for vibe slop. This is cryptography so it’s dangerous to get wrong.

But as Sun Tzu once said: yolo

# safer/faster API
rind = "0.3"

# if you use ring
ring = { package = "rind-ring", version = "0.17" }

# if you use rustls
rustls = { version = "0.23", default-features = false, features = ["std", "tls12"] }
rind-rustls = "0.23"

# if you use aws-lc-rs
aws-lc-rs = { package = "rind-aws-lc-rs", version = "1" }

There’s other adapters too if you’re lazy. Or just tell Mr AI to migrate to the rind API.

The Bill

All of this crypto jizz, it must have been expensive, right?

This took my 9-year old desktop PC… 12 days. And much of that was waiting for a usage reset.

The Opus total was about $4.2k at API pricing. But API pricing is a meme.

That’s right, I made the internet a better place* for $40. It’s ridiculous.

* Assuming anybody actually uses this library.

FIN

Real talk: Programming is dead. We had a good run.

Many of these crypto libraries have been hand optimized by some of the smartest people I know (cryptography nerds). And they get completely blown out of the water by a vibe coder with a credit card.

I know we still need humans to tell the AI to do dumb shit. Like to rewrite libraries in Rust.

But like, for how much longer?