Cyfer - the cryptographic library
version 0.6.0
Introduction
Cyfer is a portable low-level cryptographic library providing several implementations of message digest, block and stream cipher and public-key algorithms. The library is extremely modular, providing easy way to add or modify algorithm implementations, or even separating the particular algorithm from the library physically (suitable for embedded environments).
Cyfer is a low-level library. It deals only with various algorithms, and completely avoids the problems of data representation. This is most evident in public-key sections - cyfer completely avoids the existing Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) standards. If you need this functionality, use the excellent and free OpenSSL, or some similar library.
The library design concept emphasises on simplicity and elegance (of both the algorithm implementations (if possible:) and the support library code), not maximizing performance or minimizing memory footprint. The algorithm implementations are straightforward, so they can be used for educational purposes.
Cyfer is portable to any platform with sane C development environment, the only requirement being the availability of the GNU MP (Multiple Precision arithmetic) library. As the GMP is used only for public-key cryptography, hash or symmetric cipher components should work everywhere.
The library is known to compile and run in Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris and Windows operating systems, on x86 (32-bit, little-endian) and sparc9 (64-bit, big-endian) architectures.
Installation
For detailed installation instructions see the file INSTALL.
Documentation
For an overview and a short guide on how to use the library, consult the UserGuide.txt file. This file doesn't contain code samples, so you'll want to look at doc/examples/ directory (which are fairly documented, don't worry :).
Also, a fully annotated complete library reference in HTML format, (generated using Doxygen) is provided.
Features
Hash algorithms:
Adler-32, CRC-32, MD2, MD4, MD5, RIPEMD-160, SHA-1, SHA-256, Snefru
Block ciphers:
AES, Blowfish, DEAL, DES, DESX, TripleDES, IDEA, RC2, RC5, RC6,
ThreeWay
Block cipher modes of operation:
ECB, CBC, CFB, OFB
Stream ciphers:
RC4 (ArcFour)
Public-key cryptography:
ElGamal, LUC, RSA
Key-exchange algorithms:
Diffie-Hellman
Contributing
If you've spare time and would like to contribute, here are the areas that need more work:
- new algorithms - If you need an algorithm which isn't supported, just implement it and send the patch (but see below).
- test suites - There should be more tests for each supported algorithm. It's easy to write the test: Compute or find the known correct input/output pair for the algorithm, and include it in the test program.
- documentation - There's no programmer's manual, and wrapper docs are nonexistent. If you like to write documentation (does anyone?), please do :)
- ports - I have no access to "exotic" (for me, anyways) platforms and, although I've tried to make everything as portable as possible, there's bound to be (hopefuly minor) problems when using Cyfer on different platforms. If you managed to compile and run it on some system not listed here, I'd be grateful to know of that (and of any problems you encountered).
- bugfixes, bugreports - If you can fix it, great! If not, I'd appreciate if you mail me with bug description, the environment you're using, and sample code to reproduce the error.
- Any suggestions, remarks and rants you might have are always appreciated :)
Author and Copyright
Author of Cyfer is Senko Rasic <senko@senko.net>. Suggestions, bug reports and any other feedback (to the above mail address) is welcomed and appriciated.
Cyfer is free software. You may use and/or distribute it under the terms of the BSD software license, see the file LICENSE for details.
WARNING: Cyfer is provided with best intent to be useful and secure, but with no warranty; it is not heavily tested and may contain numerous severe bugs, flaws and holes - if security is your #1 goal, the wisest choice is to use tested, proven and certified cryptography implementation.