s2n VS Themis

Compare s2n vs Themis and see what are their differences.

s2n

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

Themis

Easy to use cryptographic framework for data protection: secure messaging with forward secrecy and secure data storage. Has unified APIs across 14 platforms. (by cossacklabs)
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s2n Themis
9 2
4,446 1,808
0.3% 0.8%
9.4 5.9
6 days ago 4 months ago
C C
Apache License 2.0 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.

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?

Themis

Posts with mentions or reviews of Themis. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2021-05-12.

What are some alternatives?

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

OpenSSL - TLS/SSL and crypto library

DOMPurify - DOMPurify - a DOM-only, super-fast, uber-tolerant XSS sanitizer for HTML, MathML and SVG. DOMPurify works with a secure default, but offers a lot of configurability and hooks. Demo:

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.

tweetnacl-java - TweetNaCl in Java - a port of TweetNaCl-js

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.

cryptography - cryptography is a package designed to expose cryptographic primitives and recipes to Python developers.

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.

snyk - Snyk CLI scans and monitors your projects for security vulnerabilities. [Moved to: https://github.com/snyk/cli]

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

NeDB - The JavaScript Database, for Node.js, nw.js, electron and the browser

Botan - Cryptography Toolkit

Paramiko - The leading native Python SSHv2 protocol library.