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- Frequently Asked Questions about RbNaCl
- Projects Using RbNaCl
- Installing libsodium - how to install the library RbNaCl provides FFI bindings to
Confused about cryptography? Don't know which primitive to choose? Do you have no idea what a nonce is? No worries!
SimpleBox puts cryptography on Rails. Think of it as omakase cryptography: all of the hard decisions have been made for you, providing the simplest API available while still providing the best cryptographic guarantees you are going to get out of a Ruby library, period.
Secret-key encryption works like a safe: you can put information inside of a "SecretBox", and anyone with the combination can open it.
NaCl's public-key encryption works similarly to GPG: anyone can publish a public key, and if you have someone's public key, you can put messages into a "Box", but once closed, only the holder of the private key can open it.
In the real world, signatures help uniquely identify people because everyone's signature is unique. Digital signatures work similarly in that they are unique to holders of a private key, but unlike real world signatures, digital signatures are unforgeable.
HMAC provides hash-based message authentication codes, the symmetric equivalent to digital signatures. Anyone who knows a particular secret value can use that value to generate MACs or verify the authenticity of a MAC for a given message.
Cryptographic hash functions compute a secure, fixed-length output from an arbitrarily long input. These functions are designed to keep the actual data being hashed confidential.
Hash functions specifically designed for the purposes of deriving cryptographic keys or password storage that is resistant to brute force.
Direct access to the Curve25519 elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman function that underlies NaCl's public-key cryptography
Direct access to the Poly1305 one-time MAC function used by RbNaCl::Box and RbNaCl::SecretBox to authenticate messages
Create secure random numbers without screwing it up!
Miscellaneous features which can be used in conjunction with the cryptographic features:
- Constant-time string comparison
- RbNaCl::SecretBox (alias to RbNaCl::SecretBoxes::XSalsa20Poly1305)
- RbNaCl::AEAD::ChaCha20Poly1305IETF: ChaCha20Poly1305 AEAD stream cipher (preferred IETF variant)
- RbNaCl::AEAD::ChaCha20Poly1305Legacy: ChaCha20Poly1305 AEAD stream cipher (obsolete pre-IETF variant)
- RbNaCl::Box: Authenticated public-key encryption
- RbNaCl::PrivateKey: Private keys for RbNaCl::Box
- RbNaCl::PublicKey: Public keys for RbNaCl::Box
- RbNaCl::SigningKey: Create digital signatures
- RbNaCl::VerifyKey: Verify digital signatures
- RbNaCl::HMAC::SHA256: Create 256-bit MACs with SHA256
- RbNaCl::HMAC::SHA512256: Create 256-bit MACs with SHA512
- RbNaCl::Hash: Compute SHA256/512 and Blake2b digests
- RbNaCl::PasswordHash: Compute hashes for passwords that are designed to be resistant to brute force attacks
- RbNaCl::GroupElement: Raw access to NaCl's Curve25519 elliptic curve cryptography
*NOTE: crypto is really, really, really, really, really hard