Crimson

Table of contents 1 What is it ? 1.1 Target audience 1.2 Support 1.3 Export restrictions 2 Goals 2.1 Extend 2.2 Simplify 2.3 Optimize 3 Availability 4 Current state 4.1 Wrappers 5 Plans

What is it ?

Crimson offers a superset of the cryptographic features available in the .NET framework. For various reasons Crimson isn’t distributed within Mono. The main reasons being:

Target audience

As a superset to both .NET and Mono cryptographic features, Crimson is useful to everyone, not just Mono users.

Support

Crimson is not required inside Mono to reach feature parity with MS implementation of the .NET framework and it’s related tools. As such supporting Crimson is not the goal of the Mono project.

Export restrictions

Laws regarding export and, sometimes import, of cryptography are diverse and complex. It is difficult to add/remove algorithms and keep all the required paperwork in sync.

Goals

Extend

Crimson can extends .NET cryptography by providing:

• alternative implementations of existing cryptographic algorithms;
• new cryptographic algorithms (e.g. algorithms unavailable in .NET);
• new tools (e.g. benchmarking);

Simplify

Crimson can simplify .NET cryptography by providing easier API mapping to user, not cryptographic, tasks (e.g. Encrypting file using a key, certificate…).

Optimize

Crimson can optimize .NET cryptography because it let you choose the best implementation (e.g. memory restrictions, performance, deployment) for your project.

Availability

The source code for Crimson is available in SVN under the module name crimson.

Current state

Wrappers

Crimson now has wrappers for all hash algorithms part of the libmhash library. Performance gains are visible when digesting large buffers (e.g. more than 1 Mb).

Plans

• Move Mono.Security.Win32, which is a wrapper around CryptoAPI, to the Crimson project;
• Add a wrapper assembly around libmcrypt;
• Copy managed cryptographic implementations of Mono into Crimson to optimize them (e.g. unrolling);
• Copy managed (and safe) cryptographic implementation of Mono into a Silverlight/Moonlight compatible assembly;
• Add more general benchmarking tools