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Comment by bartwe | Hacker News Reader

On this topic, what is the header-only, no-dependencies, portable, bsd licensed, simple C api, github project we should be using instead ?

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Monocypher[0], unironically. Though it's not header-only (it's a single C file and a separate header), but it's easy enough to merge the two. It even beats your licensing requirements (CC-0 or BSD 2-clause dual-license).

[0] https://monocypher.org/

That's written by Loup Vaillant who wrote "Roll your own Crypto", basically [1]. Is the consensus that it is production quality?

[1] https://loup-vaillant.fr/articles/rolling-your-own-crypto , discussed here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13221923 and related

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14917378

There's been an audit[0], at least.

[0] https://monocypher.org/quality-assurance/audit

No high or critical issues were found. The issues that were found were addressed in a timely manner.

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/5iv1ti/rolling...

IMO it's really unfortunate that Monocypher doesn't implement a high-level CSPRNG API. I appreciate that it goes against the design goal of being entirely dependency-free, but getting random number generation wrong is such an easy foot-gun in my view, and it's already my least favourite part of libsodium (its most obvious "competitor") that the AEAD constructs don't generate a random nonce for you.

Edit: Also, not sure why the author chose to use Argon2i over Argon2id as the PBKDF for Monocypher, my perception was that the id variant should be used unless you have a reason not to. Would be interested to hear other opinions on this.

Libhydrogen ?

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