gopkg.in/dedis/kyber.v0 (go): Package crypto provides a toolbox of advanced cryptographic primitives, for applications that need more than straightforward signing and encryption. The cornerstone of this toolbox is the 'abstract' sub-package, which defines abstract interfaces to cryptographic primitives designed to be independent of specific cryptographic algorithms, to facilitate upgrading applications to new cryptographic algorithms or switching to alternative algorithms for experimentation purposes.  This toolkit's public-key crypto API includes an abstract.Group interface generically supporting a broad class of group-based public-key primitives including DSA-style integer residue groups and elliptic curve groups. Users of this API can thus write higher-level crypto algorithms such as zero-knowledge proofs without knowing or caring exactly what kind of group, let alone which precise security parameters or elliptic curves, are being used. The abstract group interface supports the standard algebraic operations on group elements and scalars that nontrivial public-key algorithms tend to rely on. The interface uses additive group terminology typical for elliptic curves, such that point addition is homomorphically equivalent to adding their (potentially secret) scalar multipliers. But the API and its operations apply equally well to DSA-style integer groups.  The abstract.Suite interface builds further on the abstract.Group API to represent an abstraction of entire pluggable ciphersuites, which include a group (e.g., curve) suitable for advanced public-key crypto together with a suitably matched set of symmetric-key crypto algorithms.  As a trivial example, generating a public/private keypair is as simple as:  The first statement picks a private key (Scalar) from a specified source of cryptographic random or pseudo-random bits, while the second performs elliptic curve scalar multiplication of the curve's standard base point (indicated by the 'nil' argument to Mul) by the scalar private key 'a'. Similarly, computing a Diffie-Hellman shared secret using Alice's private key 'a' and Bob's public key 'B' can be done via:  Note that we use 'Mul' rather than 'Exp' here because the library uses the additive-group terminology common for elliptic curve crypto, rather than the multiplicative-group terminology of traditional integer groups - but the two are semantically equivalent and the interface itself works for both elliptic curve and integer groups. See below for more complete examples.  Various sub-packages provide several specific implementations of these abstract cryptographic interfaces. In particular, the 'nist' sub-package provides implementations of modular integer groups underlying conventional DSA-style algorithms, and of NIST-standardized elliptic curves built on the Go crypto library. The 'edwards' sub-package provides the abstract group interface using more recent Edwards curves, including the popular Ed25519 curve. The 'openssl' sub-package offers an alternative implementation of NIST-standardized elliptic curves and symmetric-key algorithms, built as wrappers around OpenSSL's crypto library.  Other sub-packages build more interesting high-level cryptographic tools atop these abstract primitive interfaces, including:  - poly: Polynomial commitment and verifiable Shamir secret splitting for implementing verifiable 't-of-n' threshold cryptographic schemes. This can be used to encrypt a message so that any 2 out of 3 receivers must work together to decrypt it, for example.  - proof: An implementation of the general Camenisch/Stadler framework for discrete logarithm knowledge proofs. This system supports both interactive and non-interactive proofs of a wide variety of statements such as, "I know the secret x associated with public key X or I know the secret y associated with public key Y", without revealing anything about either secret or even which branch of the "or" clause is true.  - anon: Anonymous and pseudonymous public-key encryption and signing, where the sender of a signed message or the receiver of an encrypted message is defined as an explicit anonymity set containing several public keys rather than just one. For example, a member of an organization's board of trustees might prove to be a member of the board without revealing which member she is.  - shuffle: Verifiable cryptographic shuffles of ElGamal ciphertexts, which can be used to implement (for example) voting or auction schemes that keep the sources of individual votes or bids private without anyone having to trust the shuffler(s) to shuffle votes/bids honestly.  For now this library should currently be considered experimental: it will definitely be changing in non-backward-compatible ways, and it will need independent security review before it should be considered ready for use in security-critical applications. However, we intend to bring the library closer to stability and real-world usability as quickly as development resources permit, and as interest and application demand dictates.  As should be obvious, this library is intended the use of developers who are at least moderately knowledgeable about crypto. If you want a crypto library that makes it easy to implement "basic crypto" functionality correctly - i.e., plain public-key encryption and signing - then the NaCl/Sodium pursues this worthy goal (http://doc.libsodium.org). This toolkit's purpose is to make it possible - and preferably but not necessarily easy - to do slightly more interesting things that most current crypto libraries don't support effectively. The one existing crypto library that this toolkit is probably most comparable to is the Charm rapid prototyping library for Python (http://charm-crypto.com/).  This library incorporates and/or builds on existing code from a variety of sources, as documented in the relevant sub-packages.  This example illustrates how to use the crypto toolkit's abstract group API to perform basic Diffie-Hellman key exchange calculations, using the NIST-standard P256 elliptic curve in this case. Any other suitable elliptic curve or other cryptographic group may be used simply by changing the first line that picks the suite.  This example illustrates how the crypto toolkit may be used to perform "pure" ElGamal encryption, in which the message to be encrypted is small enough to be embedded directly within a group element (e.g., in an elliptic curve point). For basic background on ElGamal encryption see for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ElGamal_encryption.  Most public-key crypto libraries tend not to support embedding data in points, in part because for "vanilla" public-key encryption you don't need it: one would normally just generate an ephemeral Diffie-Hellman secret and use that to seed a symmetric-key crypto algorithm such as AES, which is much more efficient per bit and works for arbitrary-length messages. However, in many advanced public-key crypto algorithms it is often useful to be able to embedded data directly into points and compute with them: as just one of many examples, the proactively verifiable anonymous messaging scheme prototyped in Verdict (see http://dedis.cs.yale.edu/dissent/papers/verdict-abs).  For fancier versions of ElGamal encryption implemented in this toolkit see for example anon.Encrypt, which encrypts a message for one of several possible receivers forming an explicit anonymity set.
Keywords: crypto-library|elliptic-curves|go