xc220b3

Demo

sh RUST_LOG=debug cargo run --release --example basic For the losers who use Windows

$env RUST_LOG=debug cargo run --release --example basic

Note: This has not been audited. Use at your own risk. This is a work in progress for internal use at Valera. It is likely to change and need optimisations to achieve its goals.

xc220b3 is a (planned-to-be-quantum-safe) cryptographic library based around a XChaCha20-BLAKE3 authenticated cipher. It (will) include various other things too, for example, wrappers for key exchange protocols and JWT-like certificates that are needed.

The API design is opinionated - instead of returning structs, it returns bytes which are intended for direct out-of-bound transmission. You provide the transport and in/out (including serialization) and the library secures whatever you're sending.

XChaCha20-BLAKE3

This is a custom authenticated cipher used for symmetrical encryption. It is based on the XChaCha20 stream cipher and the BLAKE3 hash function. It has some notable functional differences against ChaCha20-Poly1305, the most popular alternative using the ChaCha cipher (apart from using different ciphers, of course):

• The nonce is not a counter, or a random number. Instead, it uses the 24-byte BLAKE3 MAC for the nonce.
• This ensures nonces are never reused on the same key for two different messages, while not suffering from slowdowns experienced with random nonces.
• There is less state for a session to store (it only needs the symmetric key).
• It also saves space in messages, as additional data is not appended to the cipher during encryption apart from the MAC.
• BLAKE3 can be significantly faster than Poly1305, dropping down to 0.49 cycles per byte on modern hardware vs ~2.5 cycles per byte for Poly1305 for 16KB+ messages (5x improvement).

Key Exchange

Not ready yet. Aiming to be quantum-safe.