Hacker News Reader

Comment by wim | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile on the web RSA keeps popping up because for some odd reason it's the easiest way to do public key encryption using the built-in option, Web Crypto (it does support RSA-OAEP, but still). With interfaces like this https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/RsaHashedKe... I'm sure there's plenty of typos to be found just setting the publicExponent for example.

There are good third-party libraries but it's too bad Web Crypto doesn't offer something like libsodium's sealed box (or XChaCha for that matter on the symmetric side) to make encryption less of a footgun for devs building web apps.

View on HN

WebCrypto also supports ECDH/ECDSA, so one could get by without RSA. But point well made about it being too bad that WebCrypto doesn't offer higher level tools. I'm developing one such third-party library right now, and while HPKE[1] is a pretty thin layer on top of WebCrypto, it's unfortunate that it has to be written in JS at all. Last I checked, the crypto library sitting under Chrome (and probably Firefox as well?) already has HPKE implemented. If only there were a nice API through to it..

[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc9180/

There aren't many times where direct application of RSA's encryption transform, to recover semantically meaningful data, is useful. But widespread use of RSA predates modern crypto (what people used to call "Crypto 2.0", hallmark feature being authenticated encryption), so it's still in all the APIs.

Sadly, but unsurprisingly, searching for "Crypto 2.0" does not yield information about a shift in cryptography. What time period was this around when this phrase was being used? Where could I find more info on it? What was the shift primarily about?

That's a very good question. I heard it from Nate Lawson, and this would have been right around the time I wrote the [A-E-S "doing it wrong"] (just Google that) blog post. It's bugged me for years, too. I pretty sure he didn't make it up!

The big shift I perceived from him was from generic composition of authenticators and ciphers and such, and long sprawling discussions about E-t-M and M-t-E and "the Horton Principle" and stuff, to the AEAD ciphers pretty much everybody uses now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com