Monocypher

Monocypher is an easy to use, easy to deploy, auditable crypto library inspired by libsodium and TweetNaCl, written in portable C.

It means to eat libsodium's lunch.

Official site.

Installation

just copy src/monocypher.h and src/monocypher.c into your project.

They compile as C99, C11, C++98, C++11, C++14, and C++17. (Tested with gcc 5.4.0 and clang 2.8.0 on GNU/Linux.)

Language bindings

So far, I am aware of bindings for the following languages:

• Crystal
• Lua

Alternate distributions

So far, I am aware of the following alternate packages:

• AUR package for Arch Linux.

Test suite

$ make all
$ ./test.sh

It should display a nice printout of all the tests, all starting with "OK". If you see "FAILURE" anywhere, something has gone very wrong somewhere. Note: the fuzz tests depend on libsodium 1.0.12 or above. Install it before you run them.

To run only the self contained tests, run

$ make self
$ ./self

Do not use Monocypher without running the self contained tests at least once.

More serious testing

The makefile may be modified to activate sanitising. Just run the previous tests under the various sanitisers. If you compile for coverage mapping, the coverage.sh mapping can generate a report. Just run one of those (make sure the makefile is set up accordingly):

$ ./coverage.sh self
$ ./coverage.sh donna
$ ./coverage.sh sodium

You can also run the tests under Valgrind:

$ valgrind ./self
$ valgrind ./donna
$ valgrind ./sodium

Serious auditing

The code may be analysed more formally with Frama-c and the TIS interpreter. To analyse the code with Frama-c, run:

$ make formal-analysis
$ ./frama-c.sh

This will have Frama-c parse, and analyse the code, then launch a GUI. You must have Frama-c installed. See frama-c.sh for the recommended settings. To run the code under the TIS interpreter, run

$ make formal-analysis
$ cd formal-analysis
$ tis-interpreter.sh *.c

(Note: tis-interpreter.sh is part of TIS. If it is not in your path, adjust the command accordingly.)

Speed benchmark

$ make speed
$ ./speed

It should tell you how well Monocypher fares against libsodium. Results may vary between platforms. Requires the POSIX clock_gettime() function, which is generally disabled when using -std=C99 for strict C compliance. (See the makefile to modify it.)

To make sure the benchmark is fair, compile libsodium with suitable optimisation levels. (My first benchmarks made libsodium look really bad with Argon2i).

Customisation

If you want to use ed25519 with the official SHA-512 hash instead of the default Blake2b, do as the test suite does:

• Compile monocypher.c with option -DED25519_SHA512, or modify the relevant preprocessor directives at the beginning of monocypher.c.

• Link the final program with a suitable SHA-512 implementation. You can use the sha512.c and sha512.h files provided here.

Note that even though the default hash (Blake2b) is not "standard", you can still upgrade to faster implementations if you really need to. The Donna implementations of ed25519 for instance can use a custom hash —one test does just that.