ring VS libsodium

Again, this is just a temporary situation, and a matter of burning down a list of small tasks. Not that the OpenSSL license issue is a big deal for most anyway. Feel free to help; see this issue filed by Josh Triplett: https://github.com/briansmith/ring/issues/1318#issuecomment-...

Note also that rustls depends on ring, which has architecture-dependent code in it that is not as widely compatible as eg. OpenSSL/GnuTLS/Mbed-TLS. For example, MIPS is not supported by ring.

The AWS Rust library we were using as a dependency depended on a cryptography library called ring. This library leverages C and assembly code to implement its cryptographic primitives. Unfortunately, cross compiling when C is involved can add complexity to the build process. While it might've been possible to overcome these issues I decided that it wasn't worth digging into more.

That'd be great. Thanks Brian. Re: making ring portable to all platforms: IBM have been graciously maintaining a up to date patchset for Ring for years now and there's an outstanding PR here you may not have seen since they filed it in 2020... https://github.com/briansmith/ring/pull/1057

Beyond the simple matter of Rust being much newer than OpenSSL, one concern for some cryptographic primitives is the timing side-channel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timing_attack

In high level languages like Rust, the compiler does not prioritise trying to emit machine code which executes in constant time for all inputs. OpenSSL has implementations for some primitives which are known to be constant time, which can be important.

One option if you're working with Rust anyway would be use something like Ring:

https://github.com/briansmith/ring

Ring's primitives are just taken from BoringSSL which is Google's fork of OpenSSL, they're a mix of C and assembly language, it's possible (though fraught) to write some constant time algorithms in C if you know which compiler will be used, and of course it's possible (if you read the performance manuals carefully) to write constant time assembly in many cases.

In the C / assembly language code of course you do not have any safety benefits.

It can certainly make sense to do this very tricky primitive stuff in dangerous C or assembly, but then write all the higher level stuff in Rust, and that's the sort of thing Ring is intended for. BoringSSL for example includes code to do X.509 parsing and signature validation in C, but those things aren't sensitive, a timing attack on my X.509 parsing tells you nothing of value, and it's complicated to do correctly so Rust could make sense.

machine learning, neural networks, image processing, cryptography (though it is getting better), font shaping/rendering (though it is getting better), CPU/software rendering (though it is getting better)

Libsodium has been around for a while, so probably the reason it was posted is that version 1.0.19 was just released: https://github.com/jedisct1/libsodium/releases/tag/1.0.19-RE...

Updated NuGet and Swift packages are going to be uploaded soon.

AEGIS-128X and 256X are not there yet, but if you need them, they are available in libaegis: https://github.com/jedisct1/libaegis

All the code from libaegis will eventually be merged into libsodium, including the incremental update API which is especially useful for TLS.

To version the dependency you can check the current stable tree in git and save the date and git hash.

To address both of these vulnerabilities, you should instead use a library that handles these sharp edges for you. A well received library in the security and cryptography communities is libsodium. It has high level functions that handle password hashing and data encryption for you, reducing the risk that you introduce vulnerabilities in your code, such as you have here.

In general, cryptography is really hard. So for example, an attacker could construct a message that if you signed would leak information, ie it reduces the space of possible keys such that it can be brute forced. I’m not entirely sure if you could do that with a transfer function. But it’s certainly possible. That said, there are a ton of smart devs trying to prevent that as well so I’m not assuming anything here. But prudent practices are likely good to follow. Be very careful calling anything from your cold wallet etc. Use disposable keys for anything a bit risky. I took a sec to google an example and this is the closest I could find. https://github.com/jedisct1/libsodium/issues/170

Hi everyone! I'm learning Rust while on a break between jobs, and as I'm particularly interested in interfacing Rust with C and in cryptography, I've decided to write a wrapper around libsodium (https://github.com/jedisct1/libsodium) in Rust. This is purely a hobby project and I probably won't ever release it as there are already some open-source Rust bindings available for the library.

Can anyone recommend between Librandombytes and libsodium ramdombytes?

https://github.com/jedisct1/libsodium/tree/master/src/libsod...