Sodium: A Modern and Easy-to-Use Crypto Library

梦里梦外; 2022-08-09 10:00 2阅读 0赞

October 18, 2015

By  [Jeroen Ooms][]

(This article was first published on  **[OpenCPU][]**, and kindly contributed to  [R-bloggers)][R-bloggers]

[![opencpu logo][]][OpenCPU]

This week a new package called [sodium][] was released on CRAN. This package implements bindings to [libsodium][]: a modern, easy-to-use software library for encryption, decryption, signatures, password hashing and more.

Libsodium is actually a portable fork of Daniel Bernstein’s famous [NaCL][] crypto library, which provides core operations needed to build higher-level cryptographic tools. It is not intended for implementing standardized protocols such as TLS, SSH or GPG, you still need something like OpenSSL for that. Sodium only supports a limited set of state-of-the-art elliptic curve methods, resulting in a simple but very powerful tool-kit for building secure applications.

### Getting started with Sodium ###

The package includes two nice vignettes to get you started:

*  [Introduction to Sodium for R][]: basic hands-on introduction to the sodium R package. Gives an overview of the available encryption methods and examples of how to use them
 *  [How does cryptography work][]: a conceptual intro on cryptographic methods with examples from Sodium

If you always wanted to understand how encryption works without getting a degree in computer science, check out the latter. The basic techniques are easy to understand because cryptographers have done a great job at abstracting the mathematical details into simple hash functions and Diffie-Hellman functions.

### Installing Sodium ###

On Windows on OSX simply install the binary packages from CRAN:

install.packages("sodium")

On Linux you need sodium shared library which is called`libsodium-dev` on Debian/Ubuntu and `libsodium-devel` on Fedora/EPEL. Because this library is relatively young, it is only available for recent versions of these distributions. For Ubuntu 12.04 and 14.04 there are backports available from [Launchpad][]:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:chris-lea/libsodium
    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get install libsodium-dev

On CentOS/RHEL you need to [activate EPEL][] before installing`libsodium-devel`.

[Jeroen Ooms]: http://www.r-bloggers.com/author/jeroen-ooms/
[OpenCPU]: https://www.opencpu.org/posts/sodium-0-2
[R-bloggers]: http://www.r-bloggers.com/
[opencpu logo]: /images/20220731/27751a493b5f4725a139606c38f72fbc.png
[sodium]: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/sodium/index.html
[libsodium]: https://github.com/jedisct1/libsodium#readme
[NaCL]: http://nacl.cr.yp.to/
[Introduction to Sodium for R]: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/sodium/vignettes/intro.html
[How does cryptography work]: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/sodium/vignettes/crypto101.html
[Launchpad]: https://launchpad.net/~chris-lea/+archive/ubuntu/libsodium
[activate EPEL]: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL/FAQ#How_can_I_install_the_packages_from_the_EPEL_software_repository.3F