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haskell-nix / hnix-store

Haskell implementation of the Nix store
Apache License 2.0
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Choice of crypto libraries #66

Closed sorki closed 4 years ago

sorki commented 4 years ago

Currently we're using cryptohash-* and saltine libraries. saltine seems to cause issues on CIs like Hackage or Travis using MacOS builders due to requirement of native library.

Previously we've used cryptonite library (removed due to #18) but it does have Ed25519 implementation which could be used instead of saltine one for signature validation.

Few options 1) persuade saltine maintainer to bundle libsodium 2) make signature validation optional like Nix does 3) switch to cryptonite

Neither of these is particularly appealing to me so I would like to know your opinion about this.

sjakobi commented 4 years ago

For reference, getting rid of the libsodium system dependency would likely fix the missing haddocks issue for hnix-store-core (https://github.com/haskell-nix/hnix-store/issues/65) and downstream packages (https://github.com/haskell-nix/hnix/issues/538, https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-haskell/issues/1756).

Ericson2314 commented 4 years ago

Bundling is bad, but maybe just enough can be spoofed so the docs for saltine can be built without the C library?

sjakobi commented 4 years ago

Bundling is bad

What's the problem with bundling? It seems quite widely used in the Haskell ecosystem.

Ericson2314 commented 4 years ago
  1. It is usually copied once and neglected, so any upstream fixes don't make it over
  2. If one separately links the library, there are symbol errors unless one bothered to rename everything (which makes point #1 harder)

The intent of Cabal was always for something else to provide the C libraries, and Cabal packages to just use them.

sorki commented 4 years ago

From security perspective, bundling sounds bad and would need additional attention or automation to update the bundled lib.

I will take a peak at cryptonite to see how hard it would be to use that for signatures. Maybe even a wrapper type like Signed StorePathMetadata could work but I'm not big fan of CPP preprocessor that would be required to be able to build hnix-store with and without signature support.

sorki commented 4 years ago

@sjakobi thank you for the Hackage fix!

I've checked sodium packages cabal file and it has

pkgconfig-depends: libsodium >= 1.0.13

So tools should pick this up automatically.

Closing.