Handling secrets is extremely hard. You have to keep them safe (obviously), while at the same time you need to integrate with a ton of different systems and always provide a great user-experience, because otherwise people will just find a way around your system. When talking to peers, a lot of people mention 1Password as a company that nailed this balance.

In today's episode, I talk to Andrew about how 1Password uses Rust to build critical systems that must never fail, how Rust helps them handle secrets for millions of users, and the lessons they learned when adopting Rust in their stack.

About 1Password

1Password is a password manager that helps users securely store and manage their passwords, credit card information, and other sensitive data. It provides a user-friendly interface and strong security features to protect users' secrets across multiple devices.

About Andrew Burkhart

Andrew is a Senior Rust Developer at 1Password in the Product Foundations org, on the Frameworks team and specifically on the Core Platform squad handling the asynchronous frameworks other developers use to build features (i.e. requests into the Rust core from the Native clients, data sync, etc.). He specifically specialized in that synchronization process, getting data federated from cloud to clients to native apps and back.

Links From The Episode

Backend for Frontend Pattern - Architectural pattern for creating dedicated backends for specific frontends
typeshare - Generate types for multiple languages from Rust code
zeroizing-alloc - 1Password's minimal secure heap zero-on-free implementation for Rust
arboard - Cross-platform clipboard manager written in Rust
passkey-rs - Pure Rust implementation of the WebAuthn Passkey specification
WebAssembly (WASM) - Binary instruction format for portable execution across platforms
tokio - The de facto standard async runtime for Rust
Clippy - A collection of lints to catch common mistakes in Rust
cargo-deny - Cargo plugin for linting dependencies, licenses, and security advisories
Nix - Purely functional package manager for reproducible builds
Nix Flakes - Experimental feature for hermetic, reproducible Nix builds
direnv - Load and unload environment variables based on current directory
ACM: Spotify Guilds - A study into Spotify's Agile Model's Guilds
axum - Ergonomic and modular web framework built on tokio and tower
tower - Library for building robust networking clients and servers
tracing - Application-level tracing framework for async-aware diagnostics
rusqlite - Ergonomic wrapper for SQLite in Rust
mockall - Powerful mock object library for Rust
pretty_assertions - Better assertion macros with colored diff output
neon - Library for writing native Node.js modules in Rust
nom-supreme - Parser combinator additions and utilities for nom
crane - Nix library for building Cargo projects
Rust in Production: Zed - High-performance code editor built in Rust
tokio-console - Debugger for async Rust programs using tokio
Rust Atomics and Locks by Mara Bos - Free online book about low-level concurrency in Rust
The Rust Programming Language (Brown University Edition) - Interactive version of the Rust Book with quizzes
Rustlings - Small exercises to get you used to reading and writing Rust code

Official Links

Rust Atomics and Locks

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