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Tony Arcieri edited this page May 28, 2013 · 66 revisions

Easier-to-Use Cryptography*

Think of SecretBox like a safe: you can put information inside of it, and anyone with the combination can open it.

Box works similarly to GPG: anyone can publish a public key, and if you have someone's public key, you can put messages into the box, but once closed, only the holder of the private key can open it.

In the real world, signatures help uniquely identify people because everyone's signature is unique. Digital signatures work similarly in that they are unique to holders of a private key, but unlike real world signatures, digital signatures are unforgeable.

HMAC provides hash-based [message authentication codes]((http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_authentication_code), the symmetric equivalent to digital signatures. Anyone who knows a particular secret value can use that value to generate MACs or verify the authenticity of a MAC for a given message.

Cryptographic hash functions compute a secure, fixed-length output from an arbitrarily long input. These functions are designed to keep the actual data being hashed confidential.

Power-User Cryptography

  • Crypto::Point: Raw access to NaCl's Curve25519 elliptic curve cryptography

Support Features

RbNaCl supports serializing keys and other values in a variety of different formats, including hex, base32, and base64.

Miscellaneous features which can be used in conjunction with the cryptographic features:

  • Random number generation
  • Constant-time string comparison

Learn how to test your RbNaCl projects under Travis CI


*NOTE: crypto is really, really, really, really, really hard

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