Hacker News Reader

Comment by chubot | Hacker News Reader

Do you know about NaCl (by DJB)? It doesn't implement SSL, but it is a very easy to use library for asymmetric crypto.

http://nacl.cr.yp.to/box.html

Can any crypto experts comment on whether it is feasible / how much work it is to implement SSL on NaCl? Maybe the issue is that NaCl doesn't support all the ciphers you need.

View on HN

I do, and I hope to give it a try in the latest product I'm building. Like everyone else I'd prefer to see some expert validation of NaCl before I put a ton of trust into it. That said DJB's track record is pretty good in my eyes (I liked the design of qmail, a lot).

I've examined it, and you can fuzz comp against tweetnacl. It does the right thing generally and tests against test vectors in the build process.

I have been wondering the same thing. This link suggests that there are problems with NaCl preventing adoption, and puts forth a repackaged alternative called Sodium:

http://labs.opendns.com/2013/03/06/announcing-sodium-a-new-c...

NaCl supports only one cipher for each purpose by design, it could never be used to implement TLS. It's only useful for making your own protocol.

The SSL/TLS protocol unfortunately uses some known-bad constructions, which lead to intractable issues (see: BEAST, Lucky13 for examples)

NaCl's goals are vastly different to those of SSL/TLS. SSL/TLS aims to provide a simple, clean interface with sane defaults for the majority of simple use-cases, whereas SSL/TLS aims to provide an interface with near-infinite flexibility for the case of providing an encrypted, authenticated tunnel.

NaCl also deliberately does not support lots of ciphers, as that makes it easy for developers to choose poorly, for example, (Alleged) RC4, as is supported in OpenSSL.

Did you mean

> NaCl aims to provide a simple, clean interface ...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com