Introducing Sodium, a new cryptographic library

Re:Introducing Sodium, a new cryptographic library by alexjeffrey on Wednesday March 06, 2013 @06:40PM (#5334837)

If it works as suggested, this library binding will be a godsend to frontline developers. Cryptography is exceedingly hard to get right and unfortunately existing libraries often tend to be written for developers who are already familiar with cryptography. Hopefully this will see the adoption it deserves and we'll see less incidents like the Mega encryption scandal.

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Re:Introducing Sodium, a new cryptographic library by tptacek on Wednesday March 06, 2013 @06:45PM (#5334856)

NaCL/Sodium would not have been deployable in Mega's design. I agree with everything else you say, though!

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Re:Introducing Sodium, a new cryptographic library by alexjeffrey on Wednesday March 06, 2013 @06:50PM (#5334880)

that's true, but it's the highest-profile encryption drama I could think of - a more appropriate example would probably be the onslaught of companies which are storing passwords in plaintext or simple MD5 hashes.

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Re:Introducing Sodium, a new cryptographic library by tptacek on Wednesday March 06, 2013 @06:51PM (#5334891)

Hate to keep doing this to you† but you don't need anything like NaCL to solve that problem; just use bcrypt. Every development environment has a bcrypt.

Good example of a flaw mitigated by NaCL: the CBC padding oracle attack.

† Caveat: no I don't

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Re:Introducing Sodium, a new cryptographic library by alexjeffrey on Wednesday March 06, 2013 @06:56PM (#5334926)

OK you caught me - I don't have any relevant examples :)

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Re:Introducing Sodium, a new cryptographic library by jedisct1 on Wednesday March 06, 2013 @10:23PM (#5335855)

As pointed out by @bascule, Sodium will ship with the winning function of the Password Hashing Competition.

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Re:Introducing Sodium, a new cryptographic library by missinginaction on Wednesday March 06, 2013 @09:18PM (#5335568)

Unfortunately, like NaCl, it's missing 2 common and critical functions:

    1. Password-based key derivation
    2. Persistent key storage

So developers are still expected to work out those 2 problems and will reliably screw them up.

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Re:Introducing Sodium, a new cryptographic library by bascule on Wednesday March 06, 2013 @09:22PM (#5335592)

Sodium will ship whatever algorithm wins the upcoming Password Hashing Competition:

https://password-hashing.net/

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Re:Introducing Sodium, a new cryptographic library by mpyne on Wednesday March 06, 2013 @11:21PM (#5336061)

I thought the first one was solved at least 3 different ways over now, and that we should just pick one of [bcrypt, PBKDF2, scrypt]?

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Re:Introducing Sodium, a new cryptographic library by tptacek on Thursday March 07, 2013 @12:16AM (#5336238)

That still really is the answer for password hashes.

The right ordering is scrypt, bcrypt, PBKDF2, but even if you choose PBKDF2 you're still worlds better than salted hashes.

It makes sense for NaCL/Sodium to just pick one, though, and it makes sense for the choice to come from the hash contest.

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Re:Introducing Sodium, a new cryptographic library by jedisct1 on Thursday March 07, 2013 @12:10AM (#5336219)

See this excellent presentation by Solar Designer on this very topic: http://www.openwall.com/presentations/Passwords12-The-Future...

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Re:Introducing Sodium, a new cryptographic library by tel on Thursday March 07, 2013 @01:21AM (#5336423)

Okay, that's where I'm at these days. What is the right way to do persistent key storage?

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Re:Introducing Sodium, a new cryptographic library by qznc on Thursday March 07, 2013 @01:51AM (#5336486)

Persistence means storing it in a file or database. Not a job for library of primitives.

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Re:Introducing Sodium, a new cryptographic library by kzrdude on Thursday March 07, 2013 @07:07AM (#5337206)

I don't think NaCl keys are suitable for persistance. It seems to require absolute uniqueness of nonces.

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