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Comment by gfs | Hacker News Reader

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gfs·

> aws-lc-rs is a cryptographic library using AWS-LC for its cryptographic operations.

Why should I use AWS-LC over the myriad cryptography libraries out there already?

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I would wager this is a big reason:

> This crate provides bindings to AWS-LC-FIPS 2.x, which has completed FIPS validation testing by an accredited lab and has been submitted to NIST for certification.

If you are in a regulated environment, that’s reason enough.

Exactly, see the "Motivation" section of the README

Another nice reason is that AWS-LC includes rewrites and optimizations that make it faster than alternatives, especially on Graviton.

Are there benches on this vs say OpenSSL on Graviton and Apple M chips? I would be curious how big the difference is vs whatever NEON optimizations are in OpenSSL (and friends) already.

One reason: you can use this as a backend to rustls, and then you no longer have anything under the OpenSSL license in your dependencies, which improves the license compatibility of your project.

Again, this is just a temporary situation, and a matter of burning down a list of small tasks. Not that the OpenSSL license issue is a big deal for most anyway. Feel free to help; see this issue filed by Josh Triplett: https://github.com/briansmith/ring/issues/1318#issuecomment-...

Yeah, I realize, and I am looking forward to having multiple options to choose from that all have the same license compatibility. It's nice that there's a short-term solution that's available for people who need to ship things soon, and it's nice that there's a longstanding library (ring) that'll long-term will be capable of providing a compatible solution as well.

> see this issue filed by Josh Triplett

Check who you are replying to ;)

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