cryptography

cryptography

A Ruby library to provide abstractions for common use-cases of cryptography.

Description

Cryptography is hard. Really hard, and deceptively hard. There are a million and one ways for a developer to screw up when implementing cryptography, and non-cryptographers are exceedingly unlikely to get it right.

Unfortunately, there's a common mentality in the developer community that getting tiny details wrong doesn't matter, that it's still "good enough" to defeat hackers, if not the NSA. This mentality is, frankly, stupid and dangerous. Tiny flaws in implementation details almost inevitably result in a complete breach of security: revealing the contents of ciphertexts, allowing manipulation of the contents of ciphertexts, forging signed messages, or discovering users' passwords. Even weaknesses that seem tolerable can often be trivially combined with non-cryptographic security weaknesses to accomplish the same goals.

Despite this, there are relatively few high-level interfaces to hide the details of cryptographic primitives and to automatically use safe and secure defaults. This library strongly adopts the mentality that if you're typing the letters A-E-S into your code, you're doing it wrong.

Installation

$ gem install cryptography