From: Robert Feldt <feldt@...>
Date: 2003-06-11T07:32:06+09:00
Subject: Re: how to contribute?

On Wed, 11 Jun 2003, Dominik Werder wrote:

> - to use a cryptographic library (I don't like popen style)...
>
FYI, I have cryptor in the works. I want it to be a relatively focused and
easy to use lib of *strong* crypto based on the philosophy in the
Practical Cryptography (PC) book. I'm trying to restrict options in
each category and choose one strong algorithm for each primitive
(exception is symmetric ciphers which are used for many different things
so some choice is needed).

Currently working
-----------------
Symmetric: twofish, serpent, aes
Enc modes: CTR (fast, nonce-based, in-place)
Publickey: RSA
Hash: SHAd-256, SHAd-512 (see PC)
MAC: HMAC
Misc: Fast multi-precision integers (LargeNum)

Symmetric ciphers and RSA keygen needs C extensions, rest is pure-ruby.
Large test suite including publically available test vectors for the
ciphers.

In the works
------------
Pubkey: RSA-OAEP, DH
PRNG: Fortuna (Yarrow successor from PractCrypt book), a few entropy
sources
Passwords: salting and stretching
Key exchange: DH
Communication: SecureChannel
PKI: simple SPKI-based using Ruby hashe's (no standard-compliance)

Maybe later
-----------
Key exchange: JFK (Just Fast Keying)

If there is some interest I will try to pack something up til next week.

What this extension will not be strong on is compliance with existing
crypto like gpg etc. Goal here is to have nice and clean implementations
of the building blocks. So if you decide to do crypto for/in Ruby I'd say
community would get most leverage if you go for the standards-compliant
stuff (gpg, spki, ASN.1 etc).

My 2 cents...

Regards,

/Robert Feldt