Go and CIRCL(e) The World

Go and CIRCL(e) The World

I had great fun over the weekend investigating the Cloudflare Interoperable Reusable Cryptographic Library (CIRCL).

At the top of my list in people and organisations into crypto, I have Matthew Green (John Hopkins University), David Wong (NCC Group) and Cloudflare. I respect their viewpoints, and their approach to their understanding technology. They don’t shout about things, they just get on with showing people other ways of looking at things. They tell me new things, and I learn from them. In a world where the news just goes round in circles, it is refreshing to learn from those who actually know how things work, and can show others how important these things are.

We live in a world which increasingly is losing its interesting in learning how things really work, so it is to people like Matthew and David that I turn to for new observations on our flawed digital world.

One of the companies I respect most in their approach to Internet security is Cloudflare. They have continually push every increasing security standards. So last week they released CIRCL. Basically it’s a mixed bag of methods for post-quantum cryptography, hash to curve methods, and faster elliptic curve techniques. For Cloudflare, as they say, “technically, everything we do is done with elliptic curve cryptography” and they have a curiosity to make things just work better. I love that as a researcher, as that is what researchers do!

So here’s CIRCL with some post quantum key exchange:

And in digital signing (with ED25519):

The library is still work in progress, and I’ve found a few bugs, but hopefully it will evolve and become a trusted part of the Internet. I love that Cloudflare focus on Go, and that they are continually looking for speed-ups, and Go is the natural language for this. At the core of this, are ways of binding our digital world, and in making it a whole lot more trustworthy.