hacl-star VS KeePass2.x

Nice work. About cryptonite: have IOG considered using crypto primitives provided by HACL*/evercrypt?

Jasmin and F* don't have similar goals, Jasmin is a language designed to precisely express low-level code, while F* is a generalist language for verified programming. There is a subsystem of F* that performs extraction to "readable C code", Karamel (used to be called Kremlin), but you get the usual limitations of C code as a high-level assembler, and also an embedded assembly layer built on Vale. Project Everest therefore generates artifacts that are a mix of C and assembly, rather than a new low-level language design as Jasmin.

Traditional design by contract checks the contracts at runtime. They can be understood as a form of dynamic typing with quite complicated types, which may be equivalent to refinement types

But you can check contracts at compile time too. It's quite the same thing as static typing with something like refinement types. That's because, while with contracts we can add preconditions like "the size of this array passed as parameter must be a prime number", with refinement types we can define the type of arrays whose size is a prime number, and then have this type as the function argument. (likewise, postconditions can be modeled by the return type of the function)

See for example this Rust library: https://docs.rs/contracts/latest/contracts/

It will by default check the contracts at runtime, but has an option to check them at compile time with https://github.com/facebookexperimental/MIRAI

Now, this Rust library isn't generally understood as creating another type system on top of Rust, but we could do the legwork to develop a type theory that models how it works, and show the equivalence.

Or, another example, Liquid Haskell: https://ucsd-progsys.github.io/liquidhaskell/ it implements a variant of refinement types called liquid types, which is essentially design by contract checked at compile type. In this case, the type theory is already developed. I expect Liquid Haskell to be roughly comparable to Rust's contracts checked by MIRAI.

Now, what we could perhaps say is that refinement types are so powerful that they don't feel like regular types! And, while that's true, there are type systems even more powerful: dependent types used in languages like Coq, Lean and F* to prove mathematical theorems (your type is a theorem, and your code, if it typechecks, is a proof of that theorem).

Dependent types were leveraged to create a verified TLS implementation that mathematically proves the absence of large class of bugs, miTLS https://www.mitls.org/ (they discovered a number of vulnerabilities in TLS implementations and proved that their implementation isn't vulnerable), and HACL* https://github.com/hacl-star/hacl-star a verified crypto implementation used by Firefox and Wireguard. They are part of Project Everest https://project-everest.github.io/ which aims to develop provably secure communications software.

With that said, it's a very good thought to make sure that the software you're using is actually secure before trusting it. Personally, I think it's safe to use GnuPG and KeePass/Bitwarden, which have all been audited by the likes of Cure53, but if you're really paranoid, you could always use a formally-verified implementation of your desired algorithm (many are supplied in HACL*, for example)... In this case, I use the term "formally-verified" to mean that the implementation is mathematically proven to guarantee the properties of the algorithm (i.e., there are no "bugs" that affect output at the implementation level)...

CompCert is also very impressive. It's not, however, free software / open source (the source is available though)

https://www.absint.com/compcert/structure.htm

A problem with both seL4 and CompCert is that the code written to express the proofs is huge, much larger than code that actually does stuff. This puts a ceiling on the size of the projects we can verify.

F* is a language that tries to address that, by finding proofs with z3, a smt prover; z3 can't prove everything on its own but it cuts down proof code by orders of magnitude. They have written a verified cryptography stack and TLS stack, and want to write a whole verified http stack.

https://www.fstar-lang.org/

https://github.com/project-everest/hacl-star

https://www.mitls.org/

https://project-everest.github.io/

F* (through Low, a verified low-level subset of F) can extract verified code to C, which is kind of the inverse than the seL4 proof: seL4 begins with C code and enriches it with proofs of correctness; hacl* (a verified crypto F* lib) begins with a proven correct F* code and extracts C code (I gather the actual crypto primitives is compiled directly to asm code because C has some problems with constant time stuff). This enables hacl* to make bindings to other languages that can just call C code, like this Rust binding

https://github.com/franziskuskiefer/evercrypt-rust

Also this F* stuff is all free software / open source, so it might become a very prevalent crypto and TLS stack

This is SO exciting!!! Ituses https://github.com/project-everest/hacl-star - a formally verified cryptography library. And it compiles down to C code, so I suppose it's fast.

Whats cool with that project and overlaps with SPARKNaCI would be the HACL* Library. Its purpose is to provide a formally verified library of modern cryptographic algorithms all written in a subset of F* called Low* and compiled to C using a compiler called KreMLin. The outputs of this are already being used Firefox, see here & here.

Reminds me a little of the Everest project. Sadly, I'm not seeing much recent Everest activity on their web page or github.

And the best part is there are solutions already that do this: https://keepass.info/

Does it work on Android or iOS?

🔗 KeePass

When you're at a point where you're relying on a display name to make security-critical decisions, you've already lost.

Character substitutions like ķeepass or ƙeepass or keypass are at least possible to spot if you know the name of the product, but not the full URL.

But there are many ways to create lookalike domains that don't change the product name: https://keepass.org https://keepass.net https://keepass.info https://keepass.cx https://keepassxc.org https://keepass-info.net https://keepass-manager.com

Which of these is the correct one? (It's https://keepassxc.org of course, but just looking at the URL won't tell you that.)

The root cause is downloading software you see advertised on Google even though that does not in any way establish trustworthiness.

> People love to hate on passwords but the reality is that for many circumstances (threat models) they are the best compromise. You can make them more than strong enough (take 32+ bytes out of /dev/random and encode however you like, nobody will ever brute force that in this universe) and various passwords managers solve the problem of re-use (never reuse a password).

> And it comes with the benefit that you control how it is stored and can apply as much redundancy as you want to feel comfortable.

Honestly, I agree! I used KeePass back in the day (https://keepass.info/) but now use KeePassXC (https://keepassxc.org/) and it's really nice - I don't know any of my passwords because they're all randomly generated and are pretty secure. The only one I have to remember is my main password for decrypting the safe, which I also wrote down and entrusted to someone close to me due to its complexity.

It honestly works great, software to interact with the password safe is on every platform where I need it to be, in addition to it being super easy to reason about storage, because it's basically just a file - that I can then put on self-hosted Nextcloud, or another solution like that, or USB sticks or burn to CDs for all I care.

Maybe I should also migrate all of my TOTP stuff over to it and look into good Android apps at some point, then I wouldn't quite need Google Authenticator or FreeOTP anymore, either.

If you have used this combo at many sites (which is of course not recommended) then download one of the available free Password Managers like Keepass, Bitwarden, Lastpass or any others you can find with a Google Search

I also tried out KeePass for a little bit but prefer the BitWarden apps. The key thing here is don't store your passwords in the cloud as they are massive target for hackers.

There are various Keepass add-ons, but I prefer the standalone version.

Best KeePass Windows desktop client: KeePass

If though you can't stand the idea of your password vault on a 3rd party server then you can use an offline password manager like KeePass. Of course, you have to take responsibility for making and storing backups of your vault in case something happens to your device. Fortunately, Syncthing can make this pretty trivial.