File Server

This is a Rust server that is used to authenticate users and store files. It is used by each of the products to load various configuration files and scripts/plugins and is also used within the e-commerce store to transfer files after purchasing/downloading. Given the high frequency of file updates and downloads this service needed to be robust and fast. This is where our good friend( and arch nemesis) Rust comes in. Rust’s crazy speed and overly interruptive memory safety will ensure that this system runs smoothly and has little to no downtime. The framework used for the web server is Axum and the ORM of choice is Diesel.

Security

The server is used to store files for the e-commerce store and other products. This means that transferring these files between client and server needed to be secure. The server does use TLS but to be extra secure I also implemented additional security layers. This included:

Authentication: JWT authentication with a custom session manager.

Encryption: AES-256 encryption with unique session keys for all transmitted data, as well as an ECDH protocol for key exchange across insecure channels.

Data Integrity: SHA-256 hash verification for all transmitted data.

Rate Limiting: The package “tower” was used to implement rate limiting and ensure fair usage.

Error Handling: A custom error handler was implemented to prevent information leakage.

Logging: Comprehensive logging of all requests and responses as well as internal response > time metrics.

Ensured endpoints were secure and only accessible to authorized users and followed the principle of least privilege to minimize potential attack vectors.

Project Structure

[redacted]-cloud
├── Cargo.toml
├── src
│   ├── managers
│   │   ├── ... // Database logic seperated from web logic
│   ├── routes
│   │   ├── ... // Web routes
│   ├── services
│   │   ├── ... // Business logic (error handling, file management, logging etc.)
│   ├── main.rs
├── logs
│   ├── ... // Log files

Benchmarks

To monitor the performance of the server I track the internal response times of the heaviest endpoints (file updating/downloading, ecdh handshake, etc.). This gives me a good idea of how fast the server is processing these requests.

Total requests sent	Avg. response time
2718	25.23ms