Monocypher VS i2c-star

Compare Monocypher vs i2c-star and see what are their differences.

Monocypher

An easy to use, easy to deploy crypto library (by LoupVaillant)

i2c-star

A clone of the i2c-tiny-usb based upon STM32 and libopencm3 (by daniel-thompson)
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Monocypher i2c-star
51 3
564 112
- -
7.0 4.6
20 days ago 5 months ago
C C
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later GNU General Public License v3.0 only
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

Monocypher

Posts with mentions or reviews of Monocypher. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-20.
  • In Defense of Simple Architectures
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Feb 2024
    I rarely got to know the actual deployment scale of anything I've done. Let's make a list:

    Ground software for an observation satellite. My internship was about implementing a dead simple neural "network" (2 hidden layers, no feedback), everything was specified from up top, we didn't even get to touch the learning algorithms. Impact? I guess a big flat zero, since all the differentiators was in the learning parameters.

    Peer-to-peer social network before Facebook. Never made a cent.

    Geographic Information System for the military. I was for obvious reasons not allowed to know enough to estimate the impact of my work. And even then all decisions was made by the customer, and once the user (a different entity) saw the Rube Goldberg contraption we dully made for them they predictably balked, and we did what we could from there. Which was, not that much. I did some useful stuff for sure, but mostly I participated in a system that was arguably worse than the one that preceded it.

    A visualiser for civil radar data. Data in, little planes in the screen out. And other nice stuff. I designed a simple C++ API that allowed the client to write business code faster than we would have ourselves (if only because of communication overhead), saving weeks of work. That contribution was utterly ignored for personal reasons, and I was eventually out. I have no idea what my actual impact was, because I don't know how far the project even went, and how widely it was eventually deployed.

    The maintenance of ground software for small civil observation drones. I did some cool stuff, but then was asked to transfer ownership of this software to a recently bought team (that did stuff similar to the company I worked for). I could have known how many drones were actually deployed, but to be honest my thing just saved a few minutes of flight, while most of the cost is to get the drone and its operator on site. That company was never really profitable, I hope the good people I met there are doing well.

    Scripting language for a programmable logic controller test environment. For the military, so I don't think I was allowed to even know the size of the team we'd deliver the software to. I got good feedback from them (they were happy about what I did), and I'm pretty sure my static typing made things easier for them than if I had just picked Lua or something, but how easier, and how much money it will save in the long run I have no freaking clue.

    Stuff in a missile company I cannot disclose. I believe my impact was almost nil, I couldn't stand their abysmal tech environment.

    Prototype ADAS system. It was never deployed. Actual impact was therefore basically nil. Cool stuff to work on though, the CAN bus is a think of beauty. One of the rare instances where I could actually learn from example, instead of seeing yet again one of the gazillion obvious ways how not to do stuff.

    Ground software for some IoT device. Impact fundamentally uncertain, we had yet to sell it to anyone.

    Incident reporting software, based upon a more generic distributed base. I made the encryption layer (between users & company server), with a security based on PAKE (thus avoiding a PKI, which simplified the work of the sysadmin, at a slight loss of security). Impact fundamentally uncertain, we had yet to sell it to anyone.

    Charging stations for electric vehicles. I did the TPM provisioning, and mentioned a low-key security issue along the way. I participated in a questionable micro-service that was meant to help user interfaces (yeah, their IoT stuff had a micro-service architecture). Impact: whatever I did didn't save them: one year after I left, they're now going under.

    Preliminary study on the possible use of AMD-SEV to prevent users from peeking at our secret sauce (DRM). I don't think I was allowed to know the list of clients, and it's not even the only alternative. I don't think I could ever have assessed the long term impact of my work there.

    Flight recorder for trains (not a flight recorder then, but you get the idea). I just did little tasks here and there, didn't get the chance to have a good bird's eye view of the thing or its environment. Deployment base was knowable, but the business impact of my work was likely minimal, beyond "finish this step so we can show the client we're on track for the next short term milestone". The whole thing is a heap of technical debt, common components are impossible to update (user projects aren't locked to a given revision, they all pull from trunk), the build system is a home made monstrosity that doesn't help more than the standard monstrosities (I hate build systems)… and I was just axed from a round of layoffs.

    Cryptographic library I did on my free time: https://monocypher.org/ Nice little thing with a significant user base in the embedded ecosystem (not even my primary target). I controlled everything from start to finish, and I have no idea how many users I have, let alone how much time and money I saved them. In part because it is so simple, with such an outstanding documentation (which I mostly didn't write), that most users don't even have to bug me.

    ---

    To sum this up, my resume looks fairly horrible with respect to what I know of my actual business impact. Most of it, I think, was entirely outside my control. And I don't think I'm exceptional in this.

  • Non-code contributions are the secret to open source success
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Feb 2024
    As the dictator author/maintainer of a tiny library¹ (45 functions total), I can confirm the manual wouldn't be half as good without external contributions. And I daresay this manual is a major contributor to the usability of the whole project.

    As a new user of libcurl, I was recently able to quickly implement FTP upload and adapt it to our specific use case thanks to their tutorials and API documentation. I was even made aware of the lack of thread safety in old versions thanks to that same documentation, so I could warn my team that we should update.

    Documentation is bloody important. Almost as important as the code and the test suite themselves.

    [1]: https://monocypher.org

  • Learn Modern C++
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Dec 2023
    Are you assuming I didn't already do that? For your information I've written an entire cryptographic library in C https://monocypher.org and routinely chose C over C++. My claim that C is broken beyond repair doesn't come from ignorance or hype, it comes from over 15 years of first hand experience.

    And of course, GC and RC aren't fixes, they can't apply in the performance constrained settings C and C++ typically are used for (tiny embedded chips, video games, video encoding…).

    Also there's no way I'll even look at a new language without some form of generics. They're just too damn useful. Sure we could try the Go approach and special case generics for a few core data structures, but I believe a general purpose language needs a way to add custom ones. Heck, even Go fixed its mistakes and added generics after all.

  • Libsodium: A modern, portable, easy to use crypto library
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Sep 2023
    Then don’t forget https://monocypher.org as well. Bigger than libhydrogen but still small enough for many targets, faster across the board, and compatible with libsodium. If you can spare a couple more KB of flash in your microcontroller, you can get very good performance on the device and scale like crazy with top performance on the server side.
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Sep 2023
  • Six times faster than C
    2 projects | /r/programming | 7 Jul 2023
    Compilers don’t find all the optimisations. Last time I saw this was when someone noticed that my code was 5% slower than the reference implementation. This patch fixed it.
  • How much secure is my UDP based network protocol?
    3 projects | /r/crypto | 5 May 2023
    If encryption performance is not that important (especially on the client side, which I expect won't use too much bandwidth), but you value minimising dependencies, consider using Monocypher instead of libsodium. Monocypher is a single-file library that has absolutely zero dependency (not even libc). The price to pay for that is (i) right now it's slower than libsodium, and (ii) it doesn't provide an RNG, you'll have to call your OS's RNG manually.
  • The Free Software Foundation is dying
    2 projects | /r/programming | 12 Apr 2023
    I'm not yelling at you for your choice. See here for how hypocritical it would be of me.
    2 projects | /r/programming | 12 Apr 2023
    We kind of are though. And in some circles this pendulum has even swung too far the other way, with people scolding me for writing and distributing a cryptographic library. Because it's dangerous, and users expect security, and I'm breaking a social contract if I release crap, no matter what's written in the licence (the no liability legalese bit).
  • Uncle Bob and Casey Muratori Discuss Clean Code
    6 projects | /r/programming | 9 Mar 2023
    I believe my coding style is best shown by example. Some people have called it impressive. Some others have called it the worst they've ever seen. This may or may not come from the domain: cryptographic code tends to be pathologically straightline. At the very least it tend to produce longer functions than other domains.

i2c-star

Posts with mentions or reviews of i2c-star. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2022-05-21.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Monocypher and i2c-star you can also consider the following projects:

libhydrogen - A lightweight, secure, easy-to-use crypto library suitable for constrained environments.

ASP.NET Core - ASP.NET Core is a cross-platform .NET framework for building modern cloud-based web applications on Windows, Mac, or Linux.

vscode-gitlens - Supercharge Git inside VS Code and unlock untapped knowledge within each repository — Visualize code authorship at a glance via Git blame annotations and CodeLens, seamlessly navigate and explore Git repositories, gain valuable insights via rich visualizations and powerful comparison commands, and so much more

feedback - Public feedback discussions for: GitHub for Mobile, GitHub Discussions, GitHub Codespaces, GitHub Sponsors, GitHub Issues and more! [Moved to: https://github.com/github-community/community]

libnest2d - 2D irregular bin packaging and nesting library written in modern C++

github - Just a place to track issues and feature requests that I have for github

mlatu - A declarative concatenative programming language

unmaintainable-code - A more maintainable, easier to share version of the infamous http://mindprod.com/jgloss/unmain.html

PassMann - Simple password manager

qoi - Pure Go encoder/decoder of the QOI image format

Halide - a language for fast, portable data-parallel computation

rarvmtools - Minimal RarVM Toolchain