A software based file encryption tool where all cryptographic parts are based on a single cryptographic permutation: Keccak-p[1600,24].
Nyfe is very minimal and lightweight as it has no external dependencies.
Nyfe is licensed under the ISC license.
WARNING: Nyfe uses experimental sponge-based cryptography.
This is a personal research project of mine and at most it's a little broken.
You probably do not want to use this.
Its confidentiality and integrity are protected under Agelas.
Agelas is an experimental Authenticated Encryption stream cipher that is constructed with Keccak-f[1600,24] in combination with a duplex-sponge.
KMAC256 is used as a KDF for all derivations that take place.
KMAC256 is a NIST standard.
The random system in Nyfe is also based on Keccak.
In this case, it will instantiate an Agelas context with keys that are derived from a random seed from the system which are run through KMAC256.
It then allows random byte generation of up to 960 bytes before rekeying itself.
An 64-byte ondisk entropy file under $HOME/.nyfe/entropy is mixed in if available, in addition to system entropy.
The entropy file is rewritten immediately when used. You're on your own to generate that file initially.
The keys used with Agelas are derived from strong 256-bit symmetrical secrets that are stored in key files.
Nyfe will generate a new key per file that is to be encrypted by selecting a seed uniformly at random and using it in combination with the symmetrical key from the given key file to derive new key material via KMAC256.
The lack of meta-data in encrypted files is by design.
Performance is not considered at this stage, code correctness and extreme care in handling sensitive data was.
Nyfe has been compiled on OpenBSD, MacOS 13.x and Ubuntu 22.04.
The only real dependency is a decent libc and compiler.
$ make
# make install
Nyfe includes the NIST SHA3 tests for SHA3-256, SHA3-512, SHAKE128 and SHAKE256.
You can run them on your machine by invoking the right target.
$ make clean
$ make keccak-tests
The inclusion of these tests are to verify that the underlying Keccak-p[1600,24] implementation is working correctly.
First, you'll want to initialize nyfe and generate the default keyfile:
$ nyfe init
You can generate another keyfiles as needed:
$ nyfe keygen $HOME/.nyfe/different.key
You can also clone keyfiles, as a means of exporting them with a different passphrase:
$ nyfe keyclone $HOME/.nyfe/different.key shared.key
Now you can encrypt some things with the default key:
$ nyfe encrypt myarchive.tar myarchive.nyfe
You can pipe straight into nyfe too if thats your thing:
$ tar zcv myarchive | nyfe encrypt -f $HOME/.nyfe/different.key myarchive.nyfe
You can also let nyfe output the encrypted data to stdout:
$ tar zcv myarchive | nyfe encrypt > myarchive.nyfe
Decrypting is pretty similar:
$ nyfe decrypt myarchive.nyfe myarchive.tar
You can also pipe into nyfe for decryption:
$ cat myarchive.nyfe | nyfe decrypt -f $HOME/.nyfe/different.key myarchive.tar
When decrypting Nyfe will refuse to output decrypted data to stdout since that is a security risk as the data output is not yet verified and Nyfe does not do chunks or intermediate tags.
When encrypting or decrypting, the -f flag specifies what keyfile to use.
If the -f flag is omitted, Nyfe will use $HOME/.nyfe/secret.key by default.
Because mascottes are cool, here's SpongeNyfe:
