Crate edcert [−] [src]

This crate is a simple digital signature crate and can be used to verify data integrity by using public-key cryptography. It uses the "super-fast, super-secure" elliptic curve and digital signature algorithm Ed25519.

It provides the struct Certificate, which holds the public key, metadata and a signature.

The basics

A Certificate can be signed by a master key, or another Certificate. The top-most Certificate must be signed with the master key, or it will not be valid. For validation, the master public key will be given. This way, a Certificate can only be valid, if it has been signed with a trust chain, which top-most Certificate has been signed with the right private key.

See also here.

Other crates

To use the edcert ecosystem, there are a few other crates to make your life simpler:

  • edcert-letter, which provides a container for signed data, Letter<T>.
  • edcert-restrevoke, which provides a REST-based revokation system.
  • edcert-compressor, which provides methods to (de)compress Certificates using JSON/LZMA and manages loading/saving certificates for you.
  • edcert-tools, which provides a binary for generation, signing, validation, etc using edcert (and all of the above).

Modules

certificate

This module contains the most important struct of this crate: The Certificate It holds a public key, meta data and a signature. It can also optionally hold a private key and sign data.
ed25519

This module contains a wrapper around the libsodium implementation of ed25519. It reduces the size of signatures to 64 byte.
fingerprint

This module contains the trait Fingerprint. It provides a fingerprint() method, which is used in cryptographic context to identify some value. For example, a Certificate implements Fingerprint and returns its public key on fingerprint(). On the other hand, secure containers (like Letter in edcert-letter) could return a hash of the contained value.
meta

This module contains the struct which holds the meta data of a Certificate.
revoker

This module provides a revoker, which can be used to check if a certificate has been revoked.
root_validator

This module provides a validator, which analyzes the trust chain to validate a Certificate.
signature

This module contains the signature struct, a container for the Ed25519 signature and a reference to the signer.
trust_validator

This module provides a validator, which analyzes the trust chain to validate a Certificate but instead of a single master signature, it uses a set of trusted certificates for validation.
validator

This module contains the Validator, which can be used to validate Certificates, as well as some traits used by the struct.

Functions

copy_bytes

This is a simple copy function. This should be equivalent to memcpy.