ssec-core

This repository is not for the CLI, if you're a prospective user you probably want to be here.

Introduction

SSEC was developed as a simple alternative to ZIP for single files (analogous to gzip, but for encryption). This repository contains both the specification of the file format, and a streaming implementation (the ssec-core crate) in Rust. The implementation is based around the Futures-rs' Stream abstraction, so it is sans-IO and async runtime agnostic. The decryption implementation is structured like a state machine so that consumers can avoid blocking the executor by moving the computation of KDF onto a separate threadpool (such as a Tokio blocking task).

Security Guarantees

The headers of a SSEC file reveal no information about its contents. The only information about the contents that is revealed is the size (duh). Attempting decryption of a SSEC file requires a lot (512 MB) of memory, so even state-sponsored brute force attacks are unfeasible. When decrypting a SSEC file, the authenticity of the contents can be verified after the entire file has been read. SSEC makes no guarantees about side-channel resistance. This specific implementation uses the zeroize crate to erase sensitive material from memory (see the docs for more information about what this actually entails).

Feature Roadmap

• uncompressed mode
• Brotli compression (in brotli branch)
• Brotli decompression
• more robust testing
• fuzzing harness

Acknowledgments

This entire project was massively inspired by https://fasterthanli.me/articles/the-case-for-sans-io.