RustCrypto VS password-hashes

I would say a toy (or personal-use-only) password manager is a relatively simple project. If we are to forget about the GUI parts, you need to determine serialization of your password database (bincode + serde should be enough) and how to encrypt it. For the latter you need only two algorithms: a password hash for deriving encryption key from password and optional salt (the latter is usually randomly generated and stored as a "key file"), and an AEAD algorithm for encrypting and decrypting serialized database. There are certain pitfalls with encryption (e.g. you should not reuse nonce with the same key, especially with modes like GCM) and with properly erasing sensitive data from memory, as well as preventing it from leaking to things like swap, but learning about those is part of the learning experience.

FYI: the rust-crypto crate is unmaintained. Take a look at https://github.com/RustCrypto/AEADs instead

For AEAD with AES, you may want to use RustCrypto (https://github.com/RustCrypto/AEADs.git) instead

Dexios is a secure command-line encryption tool, that uses audited crates provided by the RustCrypto Team.

This is in relation to RustCrypto/AEADs#421 - myself and another user are having the exact same issue.

I choose an AEDS crate from the RustCrypto group: AES-GCM in its SIV variant (the SIV variant isn't really needed but it doesn't cost much).

Use RustCrypto's aes with one of its block modes (https://docs.rs/block-modes/latest/block_modes/) or AEAD algorithms (https://github.com/RustCrypto/AEADs). There's a lot of modular stuff in RustCrypto, just need to browse a little 😉.

crypto_secretbox: https://github.com/RustCrypto/AEADs/tree/master/xsalsa20poly1305

I'd recommend https://github.com/RustCrypto/AEADs. RustCrypto's crates are high quality, widely used and some have even been audited. Unfortunately they don't provide a read/write interface.

I would say a toy (or personal-use-only) password manager is a relatively simple project. If we are to forget about the GUI parts, you need to determine serialization of your password database (bincode + serde should be enough) and how to encrypt it. For the latter you need only two algorithms: a password hash for deriving encryption key from password and optional salt (the latter is usually randomly generated and stored as a "key file"), and an AEAD algorithm for encrypting and decrypting serialized database. There are certain pitfalls with encryption (e.g. you should not reuse nonce with the same key, especially with modes like GCM) and with properly erasing sensitive data from memory, as well as preventing it from leaking to things like swap, but learning about those is part of the learning experience.

I 'cheated' by forwarding everything to their separate Rust libraries which are maintained by https://github.com/RustCrypto/password-hashes . Ofcourse by adding the Elixir wrapper this could have introduced security issues (sadly I don't have enough knowledge about how NIF's handle memory ect. to test/check this myself)

As noted in the announcement, it's using the latest OWASP recommended parameters for Argon2, namely Argon2id with 19 MiB of memory, an iteration count of 2, and 1 degree of parallelism.

For password handling, I have had good experience with password-hash and the various algorithm implementations in the password-hashes repo.