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Slack Open Sources 'Hakana' to Help Developers With Hack Language

Slack open sources its internal tool Hakana to help other developers and companies using Hack language.

,   and  Sourav Rudra
2 min read

Slack, the popular team communication and collaboration platform, has recently open-sourced its 'Hakana' type checker, a tool they created for internal use.

This move comes at a time when a good deal of proprietary software is being open-sourced.

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What is it?: Hakana is a static analysis tool for the Hack programming language that uses Psalm as a base and is written in Rust.

In simpler terms, it is a tool that provides type checking for Hack by running several analytical methods.

Currently, Slack is using it to detect issues in their Hack code; they migrated from PHP to Hack in 2016 citing various inconsistencies with it.

Some of Hakana's abilities include:

  • Prevents unused functions and private methods.
  • Prevents unused assignments inside closures.
  • Ability to detect impossible and redundant type-checks.
  • Can warn about potential SQL injection attacks and cross-site scripting vulnerabilities.
  • Prevents misuse of internal Slack APIs (via Plugin hooks).

Slack mentions more of its use cases as:

We also use Hakana to automate type-aware API migrations (again via plugin hooks) and to delete unused functions in bulk. Thanks to Rust, those whole-codebase migrations are relatively quick.

Furthermore, Hakana investigates how data moves between functions in a codebase and tries to verify whether any attacker-controlled data shows up in places it shouldn't.

It also has a web version that can be accessed via web browsers using WASM, thanks to it being written in Rust.

Slack lists a couple of reasons why they decided to open-source Hakana:

  • The broader programming language community may be able to help, especially in the case of security analysis.
  • This serves to repay the favor to Psalm, the tool on which Hakana is based.
  • They expect companies with massive PHP codebases to benefit from Hakana by forking and altering it to suit their needs.
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Only a few companies use Hack language because of its 'high switching costs', meaning if a company decides to migrate to Hack from PHP, a lot of their server infrastructure will need a change too.

I suggest you go through the announcement blog if you are interested to learn more about the technical bits of Hakana.

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