cryptography 1.0.4

Cryptographic algorithms for encryption, digital signatures, key agreement, authentication, and hashing. AES, Chacha20, ED25519, X25519, and more. Web Crypto support.

Overview

Popular cryptographic algorithms for Dart / Flutter developers. Licensed under the Apache License 2.0.

This package is:

• Commercially used. Unlike some other open-source packages, this package doesn't have license issues. Correctness and audit-friendliness critical to us.
• Fast. For example, our benchmarks show that SHA-512 performance in browsers can be over 100 times faster than package:crypto by Google (thanks to use of platform APIs).
• Easy. This is probably the easiest-to-use cryptographic package written in Dart.

Any feedback, issue reports, or pull requests are appreciated! See our Github project.

Links

• Github project
• Issue tracker
• Pub package
• API reference

Used by

• kms
  • A Dart package for hardware-based or cloud-based key management solutions.
• kms_flutter
  • Uses native APIs for storing cryptographic keys in Android and iOS.
• noise_protocol
  • An implementation of Noise protocol, which can be used for secure communications.
• Add your project here?

Some things to know

• SHA1 and SHA2 implementations use the package crypto, which is maintained by Google and contains only hash functions and HMAC.
• We wrote pure Dart implementations for X25519, ED25519, ChaCha20 family, AES-CBC, AES-CTR, HKDF, HMAC, Poly1305, and BLAKE2S.
• We implemented automatic use of Web Cryptography API (SHA1, SHA2, AES, NIST elliptic curves) in browsers.
• The APIs generally include both asynchronous and synchronous methods. For instance, you can calculate a SHA-256 hash with sha256.hash(bytes) or sha256.hashSync(bytes). We recommend that you use asynchronous methods because they are able to take advantage of asynchronous platform APIs such as Web Cryptography API.

Available algorithms

Key exchange algorithms

Key exchange algorithms are subclasses of KeyExchangeAlgorithm. The following implementations are available:

• Elliptic curves approved by NIST (read about the algorithm)
  • ecdhP256 (ECDH P256 / secp256r1 / prime256v1)
  • ecdhP384 (ECDH P384 / secp384r1 / prime384v1)
  • ecdhP521 (ECDH P521 / secp521r1 / prime521v1)
  • Currently these elliptic curves are only supported in browsers (Web Cryptography API).
• x25519 (read about the algorithm)
  • X25519 (curve25519 Diffie-Hellman) is a popular, often-recommended key agreement algorithm. In our benchmarks, we observe performance of around 1k operations per second in VM.

For more more documentation, see KeyExchangeAlgorithm.

Digital signature algorithms

Signature algorithms are subclasses of SignatureAlgorithm. The following implementations are available:

• ed25519 (read about the algorithm)
  • ED25519 (curve25519 EdDSA) is a popular, often-recommended signature algorithm. In our benchmarks, we observe performance of around 200 signatures or verifications per second in VM (about 50 in browsers).
• Elliptic curves approved by NIST (read about the algorithm)
  • ecdsaP256Sha256 (ECDSA P256 / secp256r1 / prime256v1 + SHA256)
  • ecdsaP384Sha256 (ECDSA P384 / secp384r1 / prime384v1 + SHA256)
  • ecdsaP384Sha384 (ECDSA P384 / secp384r1 / prime384v1 + SHA384)
  • ecdsaP521Sha256 (ECDSA P521 / secp521r1 / prime521v1 + SHA256)
  • ecdsaP521Sha512 (ECDSA P521 / secp521r1 / prime521v1 + SHA512)
  • Currently these elliptic curves are only supported in browsers (Web Cryptography API).

Symmetric encryption

Ciphers are subclasses of Cipher. The following implementations are available:

• AES (read about the algorithm)
  • aesCbc (AES-CBC)
  • aesCtr (AES-CTR)
  • aesGcm (AES-GCM, browsers-only at the moment)
  • In our benchmarks, we observe performance of around 10-50 MB/s in VM (about 300MB - 700MB/s in browsers).
• Chacha20 family (read about the algorithm)
  • chacha20
  • chacha20Poly1305Aead (AEAD_CHACHA20_POLY1305)
  • xchacha20
  • xchacha20Poly1305Aead (AEAD_XCHACHA20_POLY1305)
  • Chacha20 is a popular cipher and it's our recommendation if you can choose an algorithm. In our benchmarks, we observe performance of around 20-100MB/s in VM.

Key derivation algorithms

• HChacha20
• Hkdf

Message authentication codes

Message authentication algorithms are subclasses of MacAlgorithm. The following implementations are available:

• Hmac
• poly1305

Cryptographic hash functions

Hash functions are subclasses of HashAlgorithm. The following implementations are available:

• blake2s (BLAKE2S)
• sha1 (SHA1)
• sha224 (SHA2-224)
• sha256 (SHA2-256)
• sha384 (SHA2-384)
• sha512 (SHA2-512)

Adding dependency

In pubspec.yaml:

dependencies:
  cryptography: ^1.0.2

Examples

Key agreement with X25519

In this example, we use x25519.

import 'package:cryptography/cryptography.dart';

Future<void> main() async {
  // Let's generate two X25519 keypairs.
  final localKeyPair = await x25519.newKeyPair();
  final remoteKeyPair = await x25519.newKeyPair();

  // We can now calculate a shared 256-bit secret
  final secretKey = await x25519.sharedSecret(
    localPrivateKey: localKeyPair.privateKey,
    remotePublicKey: remoteKeyPair.publicKey,
  );

  final secretBytes = await secretKey.extract();
  print('Shared secret: $secretBytes');
}

Digital signature with ED25519

In this example, we use ed25519.

import 'package:cryptography/cryptography.dart';

Future<void> main() async {
  // The message that we will sign
  final message = <int>[1,2,3];

  // Generate a random ED25519 keypair
  final keyPair = await ed25519.newKeyPair();

  // Sign
  final signature = await ed25519.sign(
    message,
    keyPair,
  );

  print('Signature: ${signature.bytes}');
  print('Public key: ${signature.publicKey.bytes}');

  // Verify signature
  final isSignatureCorrect = await ed25519.verify(
    message,
    signature,
  );

  print('Is the signature correct: $isSignatureCorrect');
}

Authenticated encryption with Chacha20 + Poly1305

In this example, we use chacha20Poly1305Aead, a standard that uses ChaCha20 and Poly1305.

import 'package:cryptography/cryptography.dart';

Future<void> main() async {
  // Choose the cipher
  final cipher = chacha20Poly1305Aead;

  // Choose some 256-bit secret key
  final secretKey = SecretKey.randomBytes(32);

  // Choose some unique (non-secret) 96-bit nonce.
  // The same (secretKey, nonce) combination should not be used twice!
  final nonce = Nonce.randomBytes(12);

  // Our message
  final message = utf8.encode('encrypted message');

  // Encrypt
  final encrypted = await cipher.encrypt(
    message,
    secretKey: secretKey,
    nonce: nonce,
  );

  print('Encrypted: $encrypted');

  // Decrypt
  final decrypted = await cipher.decrypt(
    encrypted,
    secretKey: secretKey,
    nonce: nonce,
  );

  print('Decrypted: $decrypted');
}

Authenticated encryption with AES-CTR + HMAC-SHA256

In this example, we encrypt a message with aesCtr and append a Hmac message authentication code.

import 'package:cryptography/cryptography.dart';

Future<void> main() async {
  // Choose the cipher
  final cipher = CipherWithAppendedMac(aesCtr, Hmac(sha256));

  // Choose some 256-bit secret key
  final secretKey = SecretKey.randomBytes(16);

  // Choose some unique (non-secret) nonce (max 16 bytes).
  // The same (secretKey, nonce) combination should not be used twice!
  final nonce = Nonce.randomBytes(12);

  // Our message
  final message = utf8.encode('encrypted message');

  // Encrypt
  final encrypted = await cipher.encrypt(
    message,
    secretKey: secretKey,
    nonce: nonce,
  );

  print('Encrypted: $encrypted');

  // Decrypt
  final decrypted = await cipher.decrypt(
    encrypted,
    secretKey: secretKey,
    nonce: nonce,
  );

  print('Decrypted: $decrypted');
}

Message authentication with HMAC-BLAKE2S

In this example, we use Hmac and blake2s.

import 'package:cryptography/cryptography.dart';
import 'dart:convert';

Future<void> main() {
  // Choose a secret key
  final secretKey = SecretKey(utf8.encode('authentication secret'));

  // Create a HMAC-BLAKE2S sink
  final macAlgorithm = const Hmac(blake2s);
  final sink = macAlgorithm.newSink(secretKey: secretKey);

  // Add all parts of the authenticated message
  sink.add([1,2,3]);
  sink.add([4,5]);

  // Calculate MAC
  sink.close();
  final macBytes = sink.mac.bytes;

  print('Message authentication code: $macBytes');
}