Monocypher Alternatives

Monocypher reviews and mentions

• Monocypher – Boring crypto that simply works
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Dec 2024
• In Defense of Simple Architectures
  4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Feb 2024
• Non-code contributions are the secret to open source success
  10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Feb 2024

  As the dictator author/maintainer of a tiny library¹ (45 functions total), I can confirm the manual wouldn't be half as good without external contributions. And I daresay this manual is a major contributor to the usability of the whole project.

  As a new user of libcurl, I was recently able to quickly implement FTP upload and adapt it to our specific use case thanks to their tutorials and API documentation. I was even made aware of the lack of thread safety in old versions thanks to that same documentation, so I could warn my team that we should update.

  Documentation is bloody important. Almost as important as the code and the test suite themselves.

  [1]: https://monocypher.org

• Learn Modern C++
  6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Dec 2023

  Are you assuming I didn't already do that? For your information I've written an entire cryptographic library in C https://monocypher.org and routinely chose C over C++. My claim that C is broken beyond repair doesn't come from ignorance or hype, it comes from over 15 years of first hand experience.

  And of course, GC and RC aren't fixes, they can't apply in the performance constrained settings C and C++ typically are used for (tiny embedded chips, video games, video encoding…).

  Also there's no way I'll even look at a new language without some form of generics. They're just too damn useful. Sure we could try the Go approach and special case generics for a few core data structures, but I believe a general purpose language needs a way to add custom ones. Heck, even Go fixed its mistakes and added generics after all.

• Libsodium: A modern, portable, easy to use crypto library
  9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Sep 2023
• Six times faster than C
  2 projects | /r/programming | 7 Jul 2023

  Compilers don’t find all the optimisations. Last time I saw this was when someone noticed that my code was 5% slower than the reference implementation. This patch fixed it.

• I've implemented some encryption/decryption in C, how is it?
  1 project | /r/C_Programming | 4 Jul 2023

  Every time I'm faced with OpenSSL, I think, "This is even more of a dumpster fire than I remember." My expectations are low, and it never fails to come in even lower than that. It's ugly and difficult to use. A good crypto API won't require all this resource management because it can all be done with small, fixed-sized buffers. In the future consider Monocypher or libsodium.

• How much secure is my UDP based network protocol?
  3 projects | /r/crypto | 5 May 2023

  If encryption performance is not that important (especially on the client side, which I expect won't use too much bandwidth), but you value minimising dependencies, consider using Monocypher instead of libsodium. Monocypher is a single-file library that has absolutely zero dependency (not even libc). The price to pay for that is (i) right now it's slower than libsodium, and (ii) it doesn't provide an RNG, you'll have to call your OS's RNG manually.

• The Free Software Foundation is dying
  2 projects | /r/programming | 12 Apr 2023

  I'm not yelling at you for your choice. See here for how hypocritical it would be of me.

• Is there any introduction/tutorial to Elligator and other random-looking ECC encodings?
  1 project | /r/atom_protocol | 23 Mar 2023

  This website does a pretty good job of going over what the creator of Monocypher found to implement Elligator. There’s also this Python code which has comments detailing the steps.

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