libsodium VS OpenSSL

Compare libsodium vs OpenSSL and see what are their differences.

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libsodium OpenSSL
30 149
11,910 24,142
- 1.5%
8.7 9.9
12 days ago 5 days ago
C C
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later Apache License 2.0
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.

libsodium

Posts with mentions or reviews of libsodium. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-09-14.
  • Libsodium: A modern, portable, easy to use crypto library
    1 project | /r/hackernews | 18 Sep 2023
    1 project | /r/patient_hackernews | 16 Sep 2023
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Sep 2023
    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.

  • Libsodium 1.0.19 Released
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Sep 2023
  • FLaNK Stack Weekly for 20 June 2023
    34 projects | dev.to | 20 Jun 2023
  • Libsodium Still Relevant and Maintained?
    1 project | /r/crypto | 21 May 2023
    To version the dependency you can check the current stable tree in git and save the date and git hash.
  • I created an encrypted command line jounal
    2 projects | /r/commandline | 22 Apr 2023
    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.
  • Why can't I burn scam tokens by sending them to 0x000000000000000000000000000000000000dEaD?
    1 project | /r/ethereum | 13 Apr 2023
    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
  • Some questions from a noob Rustacean
    1 project | /r/rust | 17 Mar 2023
    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.
  • Librandombytes – a public domain library for generating randomness
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Jan 2023
    Can anyone recommend between Librandombytes and libsodium ramdombytes?

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

OpenSSL

Posts with mentions or reviews of OpenSSL. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-07.
  • Heartbleed and XZ Backdoor Learnings: Open Source Infrastructure Can Be Improved Efficiently With Moderate Funding
    2 projects | dev.to | 7 Apr 2024
    Today, April 7th, 2024, marks the 10-year anniversary since CVE-2014-0160 was published. This security vulnerability known as "Heartbleed" was a flaw in the OpenSSL cryptography software, the most popular option to implement Transport Layer Security (TLS). In more layman's terms, if you type https:// in your browser address bar, chances are high that you are interacting with OpenSSL.
  • Ask HN: How does the xz backdoor replace RSA_public_decrypt?
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Apr 2024
    At this point I pretty much understand the entire process on how the xz backdoor came to be: its execution stages, extraction from binary "test" files etc. But one thing puzzles me: how can the ifunc mechanism be used to replace something like RSA_public_decrypt? Granted this probably stems from my lack of understanding of ifunc, but I was under the impression that in order for the ifunc mechanism to work in your code, you have to explicitly mark specific function with multiple implementations with __attribute__ ((ifunc ("the_resolver_function"))). Looking at the source code of the RSA function in question, ifunc attribute isn't present:

    https://github.com/openssl/openssl/blob/master/crypto/rsa/rsa_crpt.c#L51

    So how does the backdoor actually replace the call? Does this means that the ifunc mechanism can be used to override pretty much anything on the system?

  • Use of HTTPS Resource Records
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Jan 2024
    OpenSSL and Go crypt/tls has no support yet, so none of the webservers that depend on them support it. Apache, Nginx, and Caddy, they all need upstream ECH support first.

    - https://github.com/openssl/openssl/issues/7482

    - https://github.com/openssl/openssl/pull/22938

    - https://github.com/golang/go/issues/63369

  • openssl-3.2.0 released
    1 project | /r/linux | 25 Nov 2023
  • Large performance degradation in OpenSSL 3
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Oct 2023
  • OpenSSL 3.2 Alpha 2
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Sep 2023
  • Encrypted Client Hello – the last puzzle piece to privacy
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Sep 2023
    If I'm understanding the draft correctly, I think the webserver you're hosting your sites on would need it implemented as it requires private keys and ECH configuration. In the example of nginx since it uses openssl, openssl would need to implement it. I found an issue on their Github but it's still open: https://github.com/openssl/openssl/issues/7482
  • eBPF Practical Tutorial: Capturing SSL/TLS Plain Text Data Using uprobe
    3 projects | dev.to | 19 Sep 2023
  • OpenSSL Versions... whats the plan here
    1 project | /r/Ubuntu | 19 Aug 2023
    I confirmed that the systm was on 1.1.1f with openssl version command. Hmm...... I check the openssl version in the repo with apt list... LOL package names wernt helpful. finally went to the repo pages and found that its still on 1.1.1f, https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/openssl. Meenwhile I looked up the version history on https://www.openssl.org/ and saw that 1.1.1v was released at the beginning of this month... ok. I can understand it it was out less then 30 days. I looked up when f came out, end of MARCH 2020. NEARLY 3-1/2 YEARS
  • I am looking for a troubled/bad open source codebase
    13 projects | /r/ExperiencedDevs | 12 Jul 2023

What are some alternatives?

When comparing libsodium and OpenSSL you can also consider the following projects:

Crypto++ - free C++ class library of cryptographic schemes

GnuTLS - GnuTLS

mbedTLS - An open source, portable, easy to use, readable and flexible TLS library, and reference implementation of the PSA Cryptography API. Releases are on a varying cadence, typically around 3 - 6 months between releases.

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

Botan - Cryptography Toolkit

LibreSSL - LibreSSL Portable itself. This includes the build scaffold and compatibility layer that builds portable LibreSSL from the OpenBSD source code. Pull requests or patches sent to [email protected] are welcome.

Bcrypt - Modern(-ish) password hashing for your software and your servers

cfssl - CFSSL: Cloudflare's PKI and TLS toolkit

LibTomCrypt - LibTomCrypt is a fairly comprehensive, modular and portable cryptographic toolkit that provides developers with a vast array of well known published block ciphers, one-way hash functions, chaining modes, pseudo-random number generators, public key cryptography and a plethora of other routines.