/Chaos.NaCl

Chaos.NaCl cryptography library

Primary LanguageC#OtherNOASSERTION

Chaos.NaCl

Chaos.NaCl is a cryptography library written in C#. It is based on djb's NaCl.

Currently it supports:

  • Ed25519 signatures
  • Key-exchange using either Curve25519 (montgomery form) or Ed25519 public keys
  • Authenticated encryption using XSalsa20Poly1305
  • Hashing using SHA-512

Most functions come in two variants:

  • An easy to use variant, where inputs are complete byte arrays and results are returned in newly allocated arrays.
  • An advanced variant which uses ArraySegment<byte> to work on slices of the passed in arrays. This can be used to avoid unnecessary allocations and copies.

WARNINGS:

  • The current API is not final. I'll probably modify it.
  • Some functions are marked with the [Obsolete("Needs more testing")] attribute. Those should work in principle, but I'm not happy with the unit test coverage.

Ed25519 (Key-exchange and signatures)

Ed25519 is a public key crypto system with a 128 bit security level. It is based on the 255 bit elliptic curve Curve25519 using Edwards coordinates.

Data structures

  • Public Keys are 32 byte values. All possible values of this size a valid.

  • Private Keys take two forms:

    • A 32 byte seeds which allow arbitrary values. This is the form that should be generated and stored.
    • A 64 byte expanded form. This forms is used internally to improve performance

  • Signatures are 64 byte values

To generate a keypair first obtain a 32 byte random value, the privateKeySeed from a cryptographic random number generator, such as RNGCryptoService.

Then call KeyPairFromSeed on it to get the publicKey and the expandedPrivateKey.

API

public static byte[] PublicKeyFromSeed(byte[] privateKeySeed)

Returns the 32 byte public key corresponding the given privateKeySeed.

public static byte[] ExpandedPrivateKeyFromSeed(byte[] privateKeySeed)

Expands the privateKeySeed into the form used by the Sign function.

public static void KeyPairFromSeed(out byte[] publicKey, out byte[] expandedPrivateKey, byte[] privateKeySeed)

Equivalent to calling both PublicKeyFromSeed and ExpandedPrivateKeyFromSeed.

Using this function is twice as fast as calling them individually.

public static byte[] Sign(byte[] message, byte[] expandedPrivateKey)

Returns the 64 byte signature for message using the given private key. The signature can be verified using Verify with the corresponding public key.

public static bool Verify(byte[] signature, byte[] message, byte[] publicKey)

Verifies if signature was produced by signing message using the private key corresponding to publicKey.

Returns true if the signature is valid, false if it is not.

public static byte[] KeyExchange(byte[] publicKey, byte[] privateKey)

Returns a secred shared by the owners of the two keys pairs. This key can be used with symmetric cryptography, such as encryption, MACs and authenticated encryption.

This uses Edwards form public keys, but is otherwise identical to MontgomeryCurve25519.KeyExchange. The advantage of this method is that you can use one keypair for both key-exchange and signing.

Performance

On a single core of my Intel Core i3 M390 with 2.66 GHz I obtain:

Key generation:             116.68 us / 8571 per second / 310356 cycles
Signing a short message:    122.46 us / 8166 per second / 325746 cycles
Verifying a short message:  279.18 us / 3582 per second / 742607 cycles

This is about 1.4 times as slow as the equivalent c code.

MontgomeryCurve25519 - Key-exchange using Curve25519 in montgomery form

Compatible with NaCl's crypto_box_beforenm

XSalsa20Poly1305 - Authenticates encryption using XSalsa20 as cipher and Poly1305 as MAC

Compatible with NaCl's crypto_secret_box and crypto_box_afternm.

CryptoBytes

Contains helper functions commonly used in cryptographic code.

void Wipe(byte[] data)

Overwrites the contents of the array, wiping the previous content. This should be used to destroy cryptographic secrets that are no longer required.

Complicating factors like swap files, crash dumps and the moving garbage collector reduce the reliability of this function.

public static bool ContantTimeEquals(byte[] x, byte[] y)

Checks if the contents of the two arrays are the same and returns truie if they are equal.
Throws an expection if their lengthes differ.

The runtime of this method does not depend on the contents of the arrays. Using constant time prevents timing attacks that allow an attacker to learn if the arrays have a common prefix. It is important to use such a constant time comparison when verifying MACs.

public static string ToHexString(byte[] data)

Converts the bytes to an upper-case hex string.

constant time

public static string ToHexStringLower(byte[] data)

Converts the bytes to a lower-case hex string.

constant time

public static byte[] FromHexString(string hexString)

Converts the hex string to bytes. Case insensitive.

variable time

public static string ToBase64String(byte[] data)

Encodes the bytes with the Base64 encoding. More compact than hex, but it is case-sensitive and uses the special characters +, / and =.

variable time

public static byte[] FromBase64String(string s)

Decodes a Base64 encoded string back to bytes.

variable time