Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by vermilingua 617 days ago
Counterpoint: these crypto APIs are inscrutable for the same reason poisonous mushrooms are brightly coloured; they’re warning you away. It is extremely easy to mishandle crypto primatives, so if you’re reaching for crypto_aead_chacha20poly1305 and are confused it’s probably because you should be using a library that provides encrypt_message_symmetrically.

It just so happens that for PHP that library is the STL.
1 comments
Sammi 616 days ago
No you are still misreading the point. The complaint isn't that something like crypto_aead_chacha20poly1305 exists. It's that encrypt_message_symmetrically doesn't exist in most places.
link
throw88888 616 days ago
I am not sure I get the point here. Do you want just one standard for symmetrical encryption?

How should e.g. a C++ program know how PHP encrypts something through “encrypt_message_symmetrically”?

Embedded machinery has other needs and resources than e.g. online banking. So we can’t just have one algorithm for symmetrical/asymmetrical crypto.

link
skrebbel 615 days ago
It's perfectly imaginable for a library to exist that is designed for a specific use case (eg securely send a message to a recipient that already knows the key), is implemented across many languages and platforms, and defaults to the same algorithms and settings on all those platforms.

It's also perfectly imaginable for such a library to evolve over time, as insights in the security community improve. Eg it could add support for more algorithms, change defaults, etc. And it could provide helpful tools for long-time users to migrate from one algorithm/setting to another with backward compatibility.

It's hard to do, sure. But it rubs me the wrong way that the same people who keep repeating "don't roll your own crypto!" make it so needlessly hard for non-crypto people to use their work.

I think libsodium comes close to this ideal, but I still feel like it's pretty hard to navigate, and it mixes "intended for noobs" with "know what you're doing" functions in a single big bag. In a way, JWT is another thing that comes close, if only it was more opinionated about algorithms and defaults. Paseto (a JWT contender that, afaik, never made the splash I'd hoped it would) seems great, and I guess my entire rant boils down to "why doesn't something like Paseto exist for every common security use case?"

link