s2n VS LibTomCrypt

Compare s2n vs LibTomCrypt and see what are their differences.

s2n

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

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. (by libtom)
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s2n LibTomCrypt
9 3
4,446 1,477
0.3% 1.3%
9.4 7.3
5 days ago 24 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?

LibTomCrypt

Posts with mentions or reviews of LibTomCrypt. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2021-04-15.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing s2n and LibTomCrypt 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.

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.

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

libsodium - A modern, portable, easy to use crypto library.

Botan - Cryptography Toolkit

Tiny AES128 in C - Small portable AES128/192/256 in C

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