Warranty void.
Ruby’s openssl gem is more or less the de facto source of cryptography in Ruby. It supports largely unopinionated bindings on top of OpenSSL’s EVP_PKEY . While ruby/openssl has many helpers for classical algorithms like RSA and ECDSA, its generic bindings on top of EVP_PKEY make most ML-DSA functionality available. Since ruby/openssl provides Ruby bindings on top of OpenSSL, using ML-DSA requires…
Over the past few releases in .NET, formerly .NET Core, there has been progress on making cryptographic primitives like AES, SHA, etc. better for developers to use. “Better” is an interesting point of conversation with cryptographic API design. To a developer, better may mean more throughput, less allocations, or a simply less cumbersome API. To a framework or library author, it means thinking…
In .NET Core 2.1 a small but well-received feature was the ability to “safely” allocate a segment of data on the stack, using stackalloc , when used with Span<T> . Before Span<T> , stackalloc required being in an unsafe context: unsafe { byte * data = stackalloc byte [ 256 ]; } The use of unsafe , along with the little number of APIs in .NET that could work with pointers, was enough to deter a lot…
.NET Core 3.0 introduced over a dozen new APIs for importing and exporting RSA keys in different formats. Many of them are a variant of another with a slightly different API, but they are extremely useful for working with private and public keys from other systems that work with encoding keys. RSA keys can be encoded in a variety of different ways, depending on if the key is public or private or…
One of the nice things about .NET Core being open source is following along with some of the issues that people report. I tend to keep an eye on System.Security tagged issues, since those tend to be at the intersection of things that interest me and things I can maybe help with. A user filed an issue where .NET Framework considered a CMS valid, and .NET Core did not. This didn’t entirely surprise…
Since C# 7 there have been a lot of point releases that contain all kinds of goodies. Many of them are performance focused, such as safe stack allocations using Span<T> , or interoperability with improvements to fixed . One that I love, but is not documented well, is some special treatment that ReadOnlySpan<byte> gets when its contents are known at compile time. Here’s an example of a lookup table…
Visual Studio 2019 preview 2 was released a few days ago and I took the time to install it. Visual Studio itself is actually rather uninteresting to me, however the inclusion of the next C# 8 preview got my attention. I glanced at the feature highlights and posted “looks nice” on Twitter. Predictably, I got a few responses like “I’m not sure I like that”, and there is always a guarantee that if F#…
.NET Core 3.0 is tentatively set to include a new API for securely generating a random integer bound to a specific range. I won’t be shy in admitting that it was something I pushed for and made the initial attempt at implementing , though it’s unfair to say that I implemented it by myself given all of the outstanding feedback I got on the initial pull request (thanks Levi and Jeremy!) It’s been…
.NET Core introduced FixedTimeEquals which I have personally found to be very helpful. It’s a small method, but given the kind of code I tend to write, I was writing it a lot from project to project, and am happy to see it in the box. This API is meant to prevent a timing side-channel when comparing two sequences of bytes. The goal is, the comparison should take the same amount of time regardless…
Over the past few years I’ve started to sour on x86 architecture for just about everything. From servers, desktop, and mobile, I’ve long wished we had architectures competing with x86 at the high end. Fortunately, there are plenty of architectures out there. From ARM and ARM64, to MIPS, there are choices. There is one recent one that has been getting my attention lately, and I’ve thought it’s time…