Crate darkbio_crypto 

Post-Quantum Cryptography in Rust

This repository is parameter selection and lightweight wrapper around a number of Rust cryptographic libraries. Its purpose isn’t to implement primitives, rather to unify the API surface of existing libraries; limited to the tiny subset needed by the Dark Bio project.

The library is opinionated. Parameters and primitives were selected to provide matching levels of security in a post-quantum world. APIs were designed to make the library easy to use and hard to misuse. Flexibility will always be rejected in favor of safety.

• Certificates
  • x509 (RFC-5280): xDSA, xHPKE
• Digital signatures
  • xDSA (RFC-DRAFT): MLDSA, EdDSA, SHA512
    • EdDSA (RFC-8032): Ed25519
    • MLDSA (RFC-DRAFT): Security level 3 (ML-DSA-65)
  • RSA (RFC-8017): 2048-bit, SHA256
• Encryption
  • xHPKE (RFC-9180): X-WING, HKDF, SHA256, ChaCha20, Poly1305
    • X-WING (RFC-DRAFT): MLKEM, ECC
      • ECC (RFC-7748): X25519
      • MLKEM(RFC-DRAFT): Security level 3 (ML-KEM-768)
  • STREAM (RFC N/A, Rage): ChaCha20, Poly1305, 16B tag, 64KB chunk
• Key derivation
  • Argon2 (RFC-9106): id variant
  • HKDF (RFC-5869): SHA256
• Serialization
  • CBOR (RFC-8949): restricted to bool,null, integer, text, bytes, array, map[int], option
  • COSE (RFC-8152): COSE_Sign1, COSE_Encrypt0, dark-bio-v1: domain prefix

All functionality is WASM ready.

The entire library is hidden behind feature flags to allow selectively depending on it from the firmware, cloud and mobile app, each cherry-picking only what’s needed.

Feature gates

As a starting point, you will most probably want xdsa for digital signatures, xhpke for asymmetric encryption and cose for proper enveloping. For the remainder for the features, please consult the list below:

Feature	Description	Dependencies
argon2	Argon2id password hashing (RFC-9106)
cbor	CBOR serialization with derive macros (RFC-8949)
cose	COSE signed/encrypted envelopes (RFC-8152)	cbor, xhpke
eddsa	Ed25519 signatures (RFC-8032)	pem
hkdf	HKDF key derivation with SHA-256 (RFC-5869)
mldsa	ML-DSA-65 post-quantum signatures (FIPS-204)	pem
pem	PEM encoding for keys and certificates (RFC-7468)
rand	Random number generation utilities
rsa	RSA-2048 signatures with SHA-256 (RFC-8017)	pem
stream	STREAM chunked encryption (Age-compatible)
x509	X.509 certificate creation and parsing (RFC-5280)	xdsa
xdsa	Composite signatures (EdDSA + ML-DSA) (DRAFT)	eddsa, mldsa, x509
xhpke	Hybrid encryption with X-Wing KEM (RFC-9180, DRAFT)	xdsa

Derive Cbor

The cbor feature provides a #[derive(Cbor)] macro that generates encoders and decoders for structs. By default, structs are represented as maps, with the possibility of requesting array encoding.

In map encoding mode, all keys are integers. This is a deliberate restriction to support maps but still force non-wasteful encoding. Each field requires #[cbor(key = N)]. To encode a struct as an array, use #[cbor(array)].

Siblings

This is a sibling package with the Go github.com/dark-bio/crypto-go; as in, both repositories implement the same feature sets and API surfaces at the same version points. This naturally means PRs merged into one project necessarily have to have a counter-PR in the other project.

Bindings

This package currently has a Flutter binding github.com/dark-bio/crypto-fl that exposes the same API surface and versioning; implemented by wrapping the Rust code via FFI rather than reimplementing it.

Acknowledgements

Shoutout to Filippo Valsorda (@filosottile) for lots of tips and nudges on what kind of cryptographic primitives to use and how to combine them properly; and also for his work in general on cryptography standards.

Naturally, many thanks to the authors of all the libraries this project depends on.

Modules

argon2argon2

Argon2id cryptography wrappers and parametrization.

cborcbor

Tiny CBOR encoder and decoder.

cosecose

COSE wrappers for xDSA and xHPKE.

eddsaeddsa

EdDSA cryptography wrappers and parametrization.

hkdfhkdf

HKDF cryptography wrappers and parametrization.

mldsamldsa

ML-DSA cryptography wrappers and parametrization.

pempem

Strict PEM encoding and decoding.

randrand

rsarsa

RSA cryptography wrappers and parametrization.

streamstream

I/O helper structs for age file encryption and decryption.

x509x509

X.509 certificate wrappers and parametrization.

xdsaxdsa

Composite ML-DSA cryptography wrappers and parametrization.

xhpkexhpke

HPKE cryptography wrappers and parametrization.