This is an example implementation of public key authenticated encryption (PKAE) in Rust using only the high performance Ring cryptography library.
PKAE enables a person or service X to send confidential data to another person or service Y such that only Y can read the data. Y can also verify that the data originated from X and not an impostor.
Both the libsodium
and openssl libraries
can perform PKAE using specific primitives, however these are easy to misuse and
call a lot of potentially unsafe C code. No such similar examples to perform
PKAE exist for ring
. Also, the Rust interfaces to libsodium and openssl
require the full libraries which substantially increase code size. Finally, many
Rust crates already depend on ring
directly or transitively, including
rustls
and by extension actix-net
, actix-web
, tokio-rustls
, h2
, and
reqwest
. Writing PKAE functionality using ring
avoids having to bring in a
separate dependency.
The implementation is short and each function is documented, so the best
documentation is the code itself. A browsable rustdoc
version
can also be created using cargo rustdoc -- --document-private-items
.
Type cargo run
. If the code encrypts and decrypts the message successfully, it
should print Ok
.