cipher-base

What is cipher-base?

The cipher-base npm package is a module that provides a stream interface to transform data using cipher algorithms. It is typically used as a base for creating custom cipher implementations and can be used to encrypt or decrypt data in a streaming fashion.

What are cipher-base's main functionalities?

Stream-based encryption and decryption

This feature allows developers to create custom cipher implementations that can encrypt or decrypt data as it is streamed through the cipher. The code sample demonstrates how to inherit from CipherBase to create a custom cipher and implement the _update and _final methods for the encryption logic.

const CipherBase = require('cipher-base');
const inherits = require('util').inherits;

function MyCipher() {
  CipherBase.call(this);
}
inherits(MyCipher, CipherBase);

MyCipher.prototype._update = function (data) {
  // encryption logic here
  return data;
};

MyCipher.prototype._final = function () {
  // final block logic here
  return Buffer.alloc(0);
};

const myCipher = new MyCipher();
// Use myCipher as a stream to encrypt data

Other packages similar to cipher-base

crypto

The 'crypto' module is a built-in Node.js module that provides cryptographic functionality including a set of wrappers for OpenSSL's hash, HMAC, cipher, decipher, sign, and verify functions. Unlike cipher-base, which is a base class for creating custom cipher streams, 'crypto' provides a more comprehensive set of cryptographic operations out of the box.

bcrypt

The 'bcrypt' npm package is a library for hashing passwords. It is designed to be a secure and adaptive hashing algorithm. While cipher-base is used for creating custom cipher streams, 'bcrypt' is specifically focused on password hashing and does not provide a streaming interface.

aes-js

The 'aes-js' npm package is a pure JavaScript implementation of the AES block cipher algorithm and all common modes of operation (CBC, CFB, CTR, ECB, OFB). It differs from cipher-base in that it provides specific implementations of AES rather than a base class for creating custom ciphers.

README

cipher-base

Abstract base class to inherit from if you want to create streams implementing the same api as node crypto streams.

Requires you to implement 2 methods _final and _update. _update takes a buffer and should return a buffer, _final takes no arguments and should return a buffer.

The constructor takes one argument and that is a string which if present switches it into hash mode, i.e. the object you get from crypto.createHash or crypto.createSign, this switches the name of the final method to be the string you passed instead of final and returns this from update.