This project is a from-scratch implementation of a basic HTTPS server in Rust. The goal was to understand the fundamentals of secure web communication by building the core components myself rather than relying on high-level frameworks.
Learning by Building
While production applications should use battle-tested libraries, there is immense value in building foundational components from scratch. This project helped me understand:
- How TLS handshakes establish secure connections
- The HTTP request/response lifecycle
- Socket programming and connection handling in Rust
- Certificate management and validation
Implementation Details
The server handles the essential aspects of HTTPS communication:
- TCP socket binding and listening
- TLS encryption and decryption
- HTTP request parsing
- Response generation and transmission
By working at this level, I gained appreciation for the complexity that modern web frameworks abstract away, and a deeper understanding of network security principles.
Why Rust?
Rust is particularly well-suited for networking code due to its:
- Memory safety guarantees preventing common vulnerabilities
- Zero-cost abstractions for high performance
- Excellent async/await support for concurrent connections
- Strong type system catching errors at compile time
This project serves as both a learning exercise and a reference implementation for understanding HTTPS fundamentals. The source code is available on GitHub.