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Some gripes about nacl

tedunangst.com

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Re: Some gripes about nacl

#2

Post by amelius »

> If nacl picks up that your new CPU has some advanced instructions, it will use them, resulting in a library that won’t work on older CPUs. It’s hard to ship binaries when you’re uncertain of what CPUs they will run on.

Uhm.. What? Isn't this going exactly against all that nacl was ever designed for?

Also, why can't instructions for one CPU be translated/compiled to instructions suitable for another CPU?

Re: Some gripes about nacl

#3

Post by maxerickson »

amelius wrote: post #2

> If nacl picks up that your new CPU has some advanced instructions, it will use them, resulting in a library that won’t work on older CPUs. It’s hard to ship binaries when you’re uncertain of what CPUs they will run on. Uhm.. What? Isn't this going exactly against all that nacl was ever designed for? Also, why can't instructions for one CPU be translated/compiled to instructions suitable for another CPU?

The article is about http://nacl.cr.yp.to/ .

Are you thinking of https://developer.chrome.com/native-client ?

Re: Some gripes about nacl

#5

Post by metafex »

Simply put, use the reference nacl implementation only when you really know what you're doing. As with all things crypto it's easy to shoot yourself in the foot, and libsodium makes it a bit harder than reference nacl.

Re: Some gripes about nacl

#6

Post by pdw »

metafex wrote: post #5

Simply put, use the reference nacl implementation only when you really know what you're doing. As with all things crypto it's easy to shoot yourself in the foot, and libsodium makes it a bit harder than reference nacl.

Though the first sentence of the NaCL website says: "NaCl (pronounced "salt") is a new easy-to-use high-speed software library"...

Re: Some gripes about nacl

#7

Post by jabo »

maxerickson wrote: post #3
amelius wrote: post #2

> If nacl picks up that your new CPU has some advanced instructions, it will use them, resulting in a library that won’t work on older CPUs. It’s hard to ship binaries when you’re uncertain of what CPUs they will run on. Uhm.. What? Isn't this going exactly against all that nacl was ever designed for? Also, why can't instructions for one CPU be translated/compiled to instructions suitable for another CPU?

The article is about http://nacl.cr.yp.to/ . Are you thinking of https://developer.chrome.com/native-client ?

Ah, quite an unfortunate clash of names given the context. I confused it for Chrome's NaCl too. Although, Chrome's NaCl is short for NativeClient and this one is pronounced Salt based on their description.
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