Rust + Tor (embedded) + Static (compile) + Windows + Proof of Concept

This project makes a standalone executable built in Rust that statically compiles Tor and all of its dependencies. It uses the new (as of this writing) 0.3.3.1-alpha version which includes embedding via a small, supported API. The simple goal of this project is to make the Tor version string appear. I put a compiled version of rtsw-poc.exe in the releases area.

The vendor/ folder contains all of the dependencies as submodules. So clone this repository with --recursive. The dependencies are:

• OpenSSL - Checked out at tag OpenSSL_1_0_2n
• Libevent - Checked out at tag release-2.1.8-stable
• zlib - Checked out at tag v1.2.11
• XZ Utils - Checked out at tag v5.2.3
• Tor - Checked out at tag tor-0.3.3.1-alpha

Many many bugs and quirks were hit while deriving these steps. Also many other repos, mailing lists, etc were leveraged to get some of the pieces right. They are not listed here for brevity reasons.

Building

Msys2 and MinGW Setup

Tor is not really designed to work well with MSVC so we use MinGW instead. Since we are statically compiling, this means we use the MinGW form of Rust too. In order to compile the dependencies, Msys2 + MinGW should be installed.

Download and install the latest MSYS2 64-bit that uses the MinGW-w64 toolchains. Once installed, open the "MSYS MinGW 64-bit" shell link that was created. Once in the shell, run:

pacman -Syuu

Terminate and restart the shell if asked. Rerun this command as many times as needed until it reports that everything is up to date. Then in the same mingw-64 shell, run:

pacman -Sy --needed base-devel mingw-w64-i686-toolchain mingw-w64-x86_64-toolchain \
                    git subversion mercurial \
                    mingw-w64-i686-cmake mingw-w64-x86_64-cmake

This will install all the tools needed for building and will take a while. Once complete, we have to downgrade a couple of packages due to a bug in the current MinGW libraries. In the same shell, run:

pacman -U /var/cache/pacman/pkg/mingw-w64-x86_64-crt-git-5.0.0.4745.d2384c2-1-any.pkg.tar.xz
pacman -U /var/cache/pacman/pkg/mingw-w64-x86_64-headers-git-5.0.0.4747.0f8f626-1-any.pkg.tar.xz
pacman -U /var/cache/pacman/pkg/mingw-w64-x86_64-winpthreads-git-5.0.0.4741.2c8939a-1-any.pkg.tar.xz \
          /var/cache/pacman/pkg/mingw-w64-x86_64-libwinpthread-git-5.0.0.4741.2c8939a-1-any.pkg.tar.xz

At least these were the cached package names on my install, they may be different on others. Once complete, MinGW is now setup to build the dependencies.

Clone Repo

Inside the mingw-64 shell, clone this repo and submodules:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/cretz/rtsw-poc.git

Then you can cd rtsw-poc. We will assume throughout this guide that you are starting at the cloned root.

OpenSSL

Inside the mingw-64 shell, navigate to the OpenSSL folder and build it:

cd vendor/openssl
./Configure --prefix=$PWD/dist no-shared no-dso no-zlib mingw64
make depend
make
make install

This will put OpenSSL libs at dist/lib.

Libevent

Inside the mingw-64 shell, navigate to the Libevent folder and build it:

cd vendor/libevent
./autogen.sh
./configure --prefix=$PWD/dist --disable-shared --enable-static --with-pic
make
make install

This will put Libevent libs at dist/lib.

zlib

Inside the mingw-64 shell, navigate to the zlib folder and build it:

cd vendor/zlib
PREFIX=$PWD/dist make -fwin32/Makefile.gcc
PREFIX=$PWD/dist BINARY_PATH=$PWD/dist/bin INCLUDE_PATH=$PWD/dist/include LIBRARY_PATH=$PWD/dist/lib make install -fwin32/Makefile.gcc

This will put zlib libs at dist/lib.

XZ Utils

Inside the mingw-64 shell, navigate to the XZ Utils folder and build it:

cd vendor/xz
./autogen.sh
./configure --prefix=$PWD/dist \
            --disable-shared \
            --enable-static \
            --disable-doc \
            --disable-scripts \
            --disable-xz \
            --disable-xzdec \
            --disable-lzmadec \
            --disable-lzmainfo \
            --disable-lzma-links
make
make install

This will put XZ Utils libs at dist/lib.

Tor

Inside the mingw-64 shell, navigate to the tor folder and build it:

cd vendor/tor
./autogen.sh
LIBS=-lcrypt32 ./configure --prefix=$PWD/dist \
                            --disable-gcc-hardening \
                            --enable-static-tor \
                            --enable-static-libevent \
                            --with-libevent-dir=$PWD/../libevent/dist \
                            --enable-static-openssl \
                            --with-openssl-dir=$PWD/../openssl/dist \
                            --enable-static-zlib \
                            --with-zlib-dir=$PWD/../openssl/dist \
                            --disable-system-torrc \
                            --disable-asciidoc
ln -s $PWD/../zlib/dist/lib/libz.a $PWD/../openssl/dist/lib/libz.a
make
make install

This will put Tor libs throughout the src area.

Rust

Install Rust in Windows which installs rustup. Then, from a cmd prompt with administrator privileges, run:

rustup toolchain install stable-x86_64-pc-windows-gnu
rustup default stable-gnu

Rust is now set to the MinGW 64 compiler by default.

Proof of Concept Program

From a cmd prompt with administrator privileges, navigate to repo root and run:

cargo run

This will output:

Tor version 0.3.3.1-alpha (git-de8bc9eed6eaadfc).

To generate a self-contained executable, run:

cargo build --release

The executable will be at target/release/rtsw-poc.exe. My version is ~21MB.

This uses the new tor_api.h introduced here. Ideally we would make build.rs work with multiple targets, automate the building of dependencies, etc but this is just a PoC.