s2n VS libsodium

Compare s2n vs libsodium and see what are their differences.

s2n

An implementation of the TLS/SSL protocols (by awslabs)

libsodium

A modern, portable, easy to use crypto library. (by jedisct1)
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s2n libsodium
9 30
4,446 11,910
0.3% -
9.4 8.7
6 days ago 13 days ago
C C
Apache License 2.0 GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
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.

s2n

Posts with mentions or reviews of s2n. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-12-03.
  • S2n-TLS – A C99 implementation of the TLS/SSL protocol
    1 project | /r/programming | 5 Dec 2023
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Dec 2023
    It seems to support multiple options but requires you pick at least one of them. https://github.com/aws/s2n-tls/blob/main/docs/BUILD.md#build...
  • OpenSSL 1.1.1 End of Life
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Sep 2023
    I think GnuTLS is probably the second most popular TLS library, after openssl.

    I'll also mentions s2n and rustls-ffi for completeness as C libraries, though the former isn't widely used, and the latter is very experimental still. https://github.com/aws/s2n-tls and https://github.com/rustls/rustls-ffi respectively.

  • I want XAES-256-GCM/11
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Jul 2023
    I've seen operating on unauthenticated plaintext enough times to list it as my own pet peeve with AES-GCM. But it's a problem for chunked messages too. A few years ago we released a SCRAM mode that makes very minimal changes to AES-GCM so that it mathematically can't operate on unauthenticated plaintext. https://github.com/aws/s2n-tls/tree/main/scram
  • Golang is evil on shitty networks
    21 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Dec 2022
    > The documentation is kind of vague, but apparently you have to re-enable it regularly.[3]

    This is correct. And in the end it means more or less that setting the socket option is more of a way of sending an explicit ACK from userspace than a real setting.

    It's not great for common use-cases, because making userspace care about ACKs will obviously degrade efficiency (more syscalls).

    However it can make sense for some use-cases. E.g. I saw the s2n TLS library using QUICKACK to avoid the TLS handshake being stuck [1]. Maybe also worthwhile to be set in some specific RPC scenarios where the server might not immediately send a response on receiving the request, and where the client could send additional frames (e.g. gRPC client side streaming, or in pipelined HTTP requests if the server would really process those in parallel and not just let them sit in socket buffers).

    [1] https://github.com/aws/s2n-tls/blob/46c47a71e637cabc312ce843...

  • S2n-QUIC (Rust implementation of QUIC)
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Feb 2022
    It looks like by default s2n-quic uses this TLS implementation, which is not based on the ring crate (though it is written in C)

    https://github.com/aws/s2n-tls

  • LibreSSL Languishes on Linux
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Jan 2021
    I would be interested in the other SSL implementations:

    - https://github.com/awslabs/s2n

    - https://boringssl.googlesource.com/boringssl

    - https://bearssl.org/

    Are these subpar implementations or there are other reasons not to use these?

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...

What are some alternatives?

When comparing s2n and libsodium you can also consider the following projects:

OpenSSL - TLS/SSL and crypto library

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Botan - Cryptography Toolkit

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