Re: Idle musings on doing E over again

On 10/1/12 7:16 PM, Bill Frantz wrote:

> I found the whole library thing a total none-starter. What TLS
> libraries will be supported over all the target platforms? What
> libraries provide the necessary interfaces to check the public key
> against the vatID? I'm probably really old fashioned, but coding the
> crypto from scratch seems a lot easier than answering the above
> questions and validating the security of a library.

As I mentioned on the captalk list last month, I'd be inclined to use
djb's NACL library (http://nacl.cr.yp.to/) to get
non-connection-oriented pair-wise encrypted sessions:

 http://www.eros-os.org/pipermail/cap-talk/2012-September/015386.html

It's a lot smaller than OpenSSL (easy to embed in your app), and isn't
trying to accomodate legacy compatibility (which removes a large attack
surface). It also enables store-and-forward relaying of messages,
instead of requiring real-time live connections, which is a better fit
for Waterken's "one message at a time" style (but could still be used
with E's "live references which can die" style).

On the other hand, it doesn't immediately provide perfect forward
secrecy (ephemeral session keys, which isn't the default in SSL, but is
theoretically achievable). And you might feel obligated to convince
somebody that Curve25519/Salsa20/Poly1305 is secure despite being less
well-known than RSA/AES/HMAC.


cheers,
 -Brian