Re: NaCl support for Emacs

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Mon, 9 Jan 2012 18:48:58 +0100 Carsten Mattner <address@hidden> wrote: 

CM> NaCl's design goals, implementation and patent cleanness make it attractive
CM> to anyone who's had to make use of any kind of cipher functionality.

I think it makes sense to provide a GNU ELPA package with NaCl,
absolutely.  But it's provided as a static library and I don't know how
to convert it to dynamically loaded, and Emacs doesn't have facilities
to load arbitrary dynamic libraries at runtime.  The rest (packaging,
on-activation compile) I can handle in the package itself.  If you want
to help out... or anyone else... let me know off-list.

CM> I'd definitely favor NaCl, just because they provide a simple API with known
CM> safe defaults. Way safer than using OpenSSL without a the required
CM> crypto background.
CM> Most bugs surface in combination of the different tools from a crypto lib,
CM> because too much code is written without being aware of all the semantics of
CM> the used ciphers and modes.

Look at libnettle as Eli suggested, I'm leaning towards it since we
already have it through GnuTLS, for the Emacs core.  I still would like
to provide the NaCl support as a GNU ELPA package.

Thanks
Ted