On Fri, Oct 5, 2018 at 3:14 PM Jason A. Donenfeld <Jason@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Wed, Oct 3, 2018 at 8:49 AM Eric Biggers <ebiggers@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > It's not really about the name, though. It's actually about the whole way of > > thinking about the submission. Is it a new special library with its own things > > going on, or is it just some crypto helper functions? It's really just the > > latter, but you've been presenting it as the former > > No, it really is its own thing with important differences from the > present crypto api. Zinc's focus is on simplicity and clarity. To the > extent that we're at all tangled with the current crypto api, the goal > is to untangle as much as possible. It intends to be a small and > lightweight set of routines, whose relationships are obvious, and with > this direct and to the point organization, as well as work with the larger > cryptography community and with academia to invite collaboration. With > this comes a different way of maintaining it, with higher standards > and a preference for different implementations than the current > situation. With Zinc, you have an obvious series of C function calls > composing the whole thing, without complicated indirection. It's > something that could be trivially lifted out into a userspace library, > and used broadly, for example -- something I'll probably do at some > point. That's a bit of a design change to the current crypto api, and > sprinkling some direct function calls within the current crypto api's > complicated enterprise situation would only kick the can further down > the road, as much complexity would still remain. The goal is to move > away from behemoth enterprise APIs, and large and complex codebases to > a simple and direct way of doing things. This desire to untangle, to > start from a simpler base, and to generally do things differently > means it will go into lib/zinc/ and include/zinc/ and have different > maintainers. So we will have two competing crypo stacks in the kernel? Having a lightweight crypto API is a good thing but I really don't like the idea of having zinc parallel to the existing crypto stack. And I strongly vote that Herbert Xu shall remain the maintainer of the whole crypto system (including zinc!) in the kernel. -- Thanks, //richard
