[130578] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Keyczar
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ben Laurie)
Wed Aug 13 07:39:59 2008
Date: Wed, 13 Aug 2008 11:31:17 +0100
From: Ben Laurie <ben@links.org>
To: Cryptography <cryptography@metzdowd.com>
http://www.links.org/?p=374
When I joined Google over two years ago I was asked to find a small
project to get used to the way development is done there. The project I
chose was one that some colleagues had been thinking about, a key
management library. I soon realised that unless the library also handled
the crypto it was punting on the hard problem, so I extended it to do
crypto and to handle key rotation and algorithm changes transparently to
the user of the library.
About nine months later I handed over my "starter project" to Steve
Weis, who has worked on it ever since. For a long time we've talked
about releasing an open source version, and I'm pleased to say that
Steve and intern Arkajit Dey did just that, earlier this week: Keyczar[1].
"Keyczar is an open source cryptographic toolkit designed to make
it easier and safer for developers to use cryptography in their
applications. Keyczar supports authentication and encryption with both
symmetric and asymmetric keys. Some features of Keyczar include:
* A simple API
* Key rotation and versioning
* Safe default algorithms, modes, and key lengths
* Automated generation of initialization vectors and ciphertext
signatures"
When we say simple, by the way, the code for loading a keyset and
encrypting some plaintext is just two lines. Likewise for decryption.
And the user doesn't need to know anything about algorithms or modes.
Great work, guys! I look forward to the "real" version (C++, of course!).
[1] http://www.keyczar.org/
Cheers,
Ben.
--
http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html http://www.links.org/
"There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he
doesn't mind who gets the credit." - Robert Woodruff
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