A pure-Rust implementation of x25519 elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman key exchange, with curve operations provided by curve25519-dalek.
This crate provides two levels of API: a bare byte-oriented x25519
function which matches the function specified in RFC7748, as
well as a higher-level Rust API for ephemeral Diffie-Hellman.
Alice and Bob are two adorable kittens who have lost their mittens, and they wish to be able to send secret messages to each other to coordinate finding them, otherwise—if their caretaker cat finds out—they will surely be called naughty kittens and be given no pie!
But the two kittens are quite clever. Even though their paws are still too big and the rest of them is 90% fuzziness, these clever kittens have been studying up on modern public key cryptography and have learned a nifty trick called elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman key exchange. With the right incantations, the kittens will be able to secretly organise to find their mittens, and then spend the rest of the afternoon nomming some yummy pie!
First, Alice uses EphemeralSecret::new() and then
EphemeralPublic::from() to produce her secret and public keys:
extern crate x25519_dalek;
extern crate rand_os;
use x25519_dalek::EphemeralPublic;
use x25519_dalek::EphemeralSecret;
use rand_os::OsRng;
let mut alice_csprng = OsRng::new().unwrap();
let alice_secret = EphemeralSecret::new(&mut alice_csprng);
let alice_public = EphemeralPublic::from(&alice_secret);Bob does the same:
let mut bob_csprng = OsRng::new().unwrap();
let bob_secret = EphemeralSecret::new(&mut bob_csprng);
let bob_public = EphemeralPublic::from(&bob_secret);Alice meows across the room, telling alice_public to Bob, and Bob
loudly meows bob_public back to Alice. Alice now computes her
shared secret with Bob by doing:
use x25519_dalek::EphemeralPublic;
use x25519_dalek::EphemeralSecret;
let shared_secret = EphemeralSecret::diffie_hellman(alice_secret, &bob_public);Similarly, Bob computes the same shared secret by doing:
let shared_secret = EphemeralSecret::diffie_hellman(bob_secret, &alice_public);Voilá! Alice and Bob can now use their shared secret to encrypt their meows, for example, by using it to generate a key and nonce for an authenticated-encryption cipher.
To install, add the following to your project's Cargo.toml:
[dependencies.x25519-dalek]
version = "^0.4"Documentation is available here.
This code matches the RFC7748 test vectors.
The elliptic curve
operations are provided by curve25519-dalek, which makes a best-effort
attempt to prevent software side-channels.
"Secret Messages" cover image and zine copyright © Amy Wibowo (@sailorhg)