3 ms·

ETW is pretty bad but, for Windows APIs, it feels pretty middle-of-the-pack to me. OpenSSL, on the other hand, is an endless nightmare to work with: clusters o

ETW is pretty bad but, for Windows APIs, it feels pretty middle-of-the-pack to me. OpenSSL, on the other hand, is an endless nightmare to work with: clusters of APIs that are behaviorally similar (retrieving the attributes within an X.509 certificate, for example) have wildly different function signatures. Even when function signatures for similar APIs resemble each other, their interior behaviors vary widely (around assuming that lengths include NULs, maintaining or not maintaining interior reference counts, etc.). Seemingly basic functionalities ("turn a buffer of PEM-encoded certificates into a `STACK_OF(X509)`") have no APIs at all; other APIs solve simple tasks through obscenely overpowered (and dangerous) primitives (such as `X509V3_EXT_conf`). And so on.

sph 3y ago
I'm building an app that uses the Web Crypto API and the annoying thing about cryptography is that in practice you're calling a ton of different algorithms with slightly varied argument, which of course you have to name, and makes code reuse practically impossible. You can have an `encrypt` function, that takes an RSA key, but wait, if you're encrypting with AES-GCM you also need a salt and an IV, that other times is called a nonce (which is similar to an IV but not exactly). But wait, if you're encrypting a key, you're actually "wrapping" a key, so your API should clarify all these little variations in process, which is a pain. Given that the error conditions are very opaque, to avoid mistakes you need a very clear and verbose API on top of the bare crypto functions to stay sane. Literally my morning plan for today is refactor the cryptography functions in my project because they're an unwieldy mess.
- adammarples 3y ago
  Would be pretty cool to use multiple dispatch, a la Julia. The encryption function knows which one you're using based on the types you pass as arguments.
  - dan-robertson 3y ago
    I would not find that cool. I think for a typical crypto use case: (A) you want to use exactly one encryption method (eg no algorithm negotiation) (B) you want to be very careful about calling the right functions with the right arguments Relying on compiler magic doesn’t sound good for that to me. Though the grandparent comment does seem to go against (A) so maybe the situation is different.

sph 3y ago

I'm building an app that uses the Web Crypto API and the annoying thing about cryptography is that in practice you're calling a ton of different algorithms with slightly varied argument, which of course you have to name, and makes code reuse practically impossible. You can have an `encrypt` function, that takes an RSA key, but wait, if you're encrypting with AES-GCM you also need a salt and an IV, that other times is called a nonce (which is similar to an IV but not exactly). But wait, if you're encrypting a key, you're actually "wrapping" a key, so your API should clarify all these little variations in process, which is a pain. Given that the error conditions are very opaque, to avoid mistakes you need a very clear and verbose API on top of the bare crypto functions to stay sane. Literally my morning plan for today is refactor the cryptography functions in my project because they're an unwieldy mess.

adammarples 3y ago
Would be pretty cool to use multiple dispatch, a la Julia. The encryption function knows which one you're using based on the types you pass as arguments.
- dan-robertson 3y ago
  I would not find that cool. I think for a typical crypto use case: (A) you want to use exactly one encryption method (eg no algorithm negotiation) (B) you want to be very careful about calling the right functions with the right arguments Relying on compiler magic doesn’t sound good for that to me. Though the grandparent comment does seem to go against (A) so maybe the situation is different.