orion VS ring

GitHub: https://github.com/orion-rs/orion Crates.io: https://crates.io/crates/orion

I'm the author and maintainer of a pure-Rust crypto library called Orion. I've been at it for a couple of years now, working on it in my spare time as well. There are a few people involved already, but we're still missing someone that is involved enough to be a "co-maintainer". There are some larger features that have been planned, but I lack the time currently to start too many new things. Of course, you can contribute in any amount you want.

Custom (the ones I have in the implementation I wrote)

With that said, i think multiple people are working on crypto libraries that take footguns out of it - which is what i think we definitely need. https://github.com/brycx/orion seems like a solid attempt at making crypto fool-proof , so i do have hope.

You're more than welcome to swing by at Orion (a pure-Rust crypto lib). You can also check the new Matrix room for a small chat.

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)