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Zinc: Introduce minimal cryptography library (kernel.org)
116 points by ascorbic on Aug 2, 2018 | hide | past | favorite | 9 comments



> cascade of architecture-specific functions is done as ifdefs within one file, so that it's easy and obvious and clear what's happening...

Not in my opinion, having an arch ifdefs makes things much less clear as I effectively have to parse the ifdefs within the code while trying to understand what it's doing, compound that with n arch specific optimizations and it quickly grows out of hand. An arch over-ride file (e.g. $arch/foo.[cs] over-rides dir/foo.c) is much easier to read.


The linux-crypto maintainer seems to agree: https://marc.info/?l=linux-crypto-vger&m=153310819905231


Herbert Xu is the linux-crypto maintainer and he wasn't even Cc'ed, neither was linux-crypto mailing list in the submission. Not an appropriate behavior from Wireguard folks ...



"This initial commit adds implementations of the primitives used by WireGuard" is apparently the relation to the WireGuard discussion linked above.


zx2c4 (Jason A. Donenfeld) is the main developer of WireGuard, and Zinc. The name "zinc" could be a nod to NaCl / libsodium.


I wonder how these perform over libsodium's implementations. (Particularly regarding the assembly).


They are probably way faster. Speed is not what libhydrogen and libsodium are obsessed about.


OT, but I'm so glad to see the word "hesitance" rather than the abomination one might expect, "hesitancy".




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