Open franziskuskiefer opened 3 years ago
As someone who is interested in cryptography and Rust, I completely agree with this statement. The modular approach to cryptography in Rust is a significant departure from the monolithic libraries in C, and it offers a lot of flexibility and versatility. Understanding how cryptography crates are used is essential for anyone looking to work with cryptography in Rust.
I think it's also important to define what safe and ideal usage of cryptography in Rust should look like. This will ensure that cryptography implementors and consumers are using best practices and minimizing the risk of security vulnerabilities.
It will be great to see the group's recommendations for cryptography implementors and consumers to make Rust cryptography usable and safe. This will help the wider community benefit from the strengths of Rust and cryptography and ensure the security of their applications.
The way cryptography is structured in Rust differs a lot from the way it is used in C. In the C world we have these large monolithic libraries such as OpenSSL etc. While these exist in Rust as well with crates such as ring (mostly as wrappers) the approach differs for most Rust-only crytography where individual crates are used for each type of cryptographic primitive.
This group should try to understand how cryptography crates are used. At the same time the group should try to define what it thinks ideal, safe usage of cryptography in Rust should look like. Eventually the two angles can be used to come up with recommendations for cryptography implementors and consumers to make rust cryptography usable and safe.