For those of you who will have to develop cryptographic code (crypto for short) at some time in your career. You may need to construct a password authentication system for your users by storing salted password hashes, add encryption to your own binary protocol implementation, or save certain information safely on disk, among other things. This is frequently more difficult than it appears. And you will need to employ a crypto library to complete the task. In this post, we’d like to provide a brief overview of what is Crypto++, a C++ cryptography library. The initial encounter with it raised many questions. Hopefully, the information in this post will be useful to you and will save you time.
What is crypto++?
Why using a crypto library is crucial?
When working with cryptography, it is required to employ standardised primitives that are built by cryptography engineers and approved by actual security specialists. Writing encryption code is difficult and error-prone. A minor error might put your algorithm fully unsafe. Even the simplest things are important.
Consider your encrypted data to be made up of a header and a payload. You decode the header, then do some sanity checks before decrypting the content. Assume you instantly return error if you discover the header is junk after decrypting it. Why bother with the payload when the header is useless? If you do this, your implementation becomes open to a timing attack.
An attacker can use a brute force attack to determine how quickly your code returns an error. If this sounds crazy, learn about the Keyczar library timing approach. It is a similar strategy to apply there.
Why using a crypto library is crucial?
So, one again, please never implement (or, worse, create) your own cryptographic algorithms! Use tried-and-true libraries created and tested by professionals.
Cryptography is a complex field, and any mistakes there come at a great cost. You’ve probably heard stories of failed self-made encryption, exposed passwords, and other such things.
Understanding how to use Crypto++ is crucial, but understanding how the cryptosystem you are going to employ works and for what purposes it is appropriate is even more important. Before adopting a Crypto++ algorithm, please take the time to learn how it works and ensure that it is appropriate for your usecase. This will simplify your work and save you time in the future.
What is Crypto++?
Wei Dai created the free and open-source C++ class library, or Crypto++, sometimes referred to as CryptoPP, libcrypto++, and libcryptopp, which contains cryptography algorithms and schemes.
Crypto++ is extensively popular in academia, student projects, open-source, non-commercial, and commercial projects, as well as companies.
The library, which was first available in 1995, offers complete support for 32-bit and 64-bit architectures on a wide range of popular platforms and operating systems, including Android (using STLport), Apple’s Mac OS X and iOS, BSD, Cygwin, IBM AIX and S/390, Linux, MinGW, Solaris, Windows, Windows Phone, and Windows RT.
Crypto++ is extensively popular in academia, student projects, open-source, non-commercial, and commercial projects
Crypto++ Algorithms
Typically, Crypto++ offers comprehensive cryptographic implementations and frequently includes less well-known, less commonly used algorithms.
For instance, the library includes Whirlpool, an ISO/NESSIE/IETF-approved hash function that is basically comparable to SHA, and Camellia, an ISO/NESSIE/IETF-approved block cipher that is roughly equivalent to AES.
Additionally, the cryptography community can occasionally analyze cutting-edge implementations thanks to the Crypto++ library. For instance, Brainpool curves, which were proposed in March 2009 as an Internet Draft in RFC 5639, were added to Crypto++ 5.6.0 in the same month.
Or VMAC, a universal hash-based message authentication code, also joined the library during its submission to the Internet Engineering Task Force (CFRG Working Group).
To conclude, we hope you find the answer for the question what is Crypto++. Thank you for reading!
