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luasodium

Bindings to Libsodium, with support for the Lua C API as well as LuaJIT's FFI API.

There's basically three methods for loading the API, they're tried in this order:

FFI API from a C module, with function pointers.
Traditional C API
FFI API, using ffi.load to load libsodium at runtime.

If you'd like to load a specific version, you can append:

.ffi (to use FFI via pointers in a C module)
.core (to use the traditional C API).
.pureffi (to use FFI and find/load libsodium at runtime).

The .core and .ffi variants don't exist in the OpenResty Package Manager version, since OPM doesn't support C modules.

Example:

local luasodium         = require'luasodium'          -- tries to load FFI, fallback to C API
local luasodium_ffi     = require'luasodium.ffi'      -- uses the FFI API (in a C module)
local luasodium_c       = require'luasodium.core'     -- uses the C API
local luasodium_pureffi = require'luasodium.pureffi'  -- uses the FFI API (without any C modules)

Status

Version 1.0

As of version 1.0.0, this module covers:

All original, high-level functions from NaCl (crypto_box, crypto_secretbox, and so on).
All of libsodium's additions to NaCl's high-level functions (crypto_box_easy, crypto_secretbox_easy).
All of libsodium's utility functions and random data generating functions.

It does not yet cover the entire libsodium API.

Details on what functions were implemented can be found under the Version 1.0.0 Milestone.

Version 1.1

All original lower-level functions from NaCl (crypto_box_curve25519xsalsa20poly1305, crypto_secretbox_xsalsa20poly1305). This means version 1.1 has 100% NaCl coverage.

Version 1.2

The libsodium crypto_generichash API.
The libsodium crypto_secretstream API.

Details on what functions were implemented can be found under the Version 1.2.0 Milestone.

Version 1.3

The libsodium crypto_shorthash API.
The libsodium crypto_pwhash API.

Details on what functions were implemented can be found under the Version 1.3.0 Milestone.

Version 2.0

No functional changes, but an API change. libsodium errors no longer throw errors, they return nil and an error message.

Version 2.1

The libsodium crypto_aead API.

Details on what functions were implemented can be found under the Version 2.1.0 Milestone.

Version 2.2

This version no longer uses malloc/free and instead uses sodium_malloc and sodium_free, for data allocations that require alignment. This simplifies the FFI version somewhat - it no longer needs to load the C library's malloc/free, and no longer needs wrappers to call sodium_memzero when structures are garbage collected, since sodium_free will take care of that.

This version also adds the scrypt pwhash functions.

Version 2.3

This version removes the use of sodium_malloc and sodium_free introduced in version 2.2. Per the libsodium docs:

These are not general-purpose allocation functions. In particular, they are slower than malloc() and friends and require 3 or 4 extra pages of virtual memory.

I experienced segfaults, etc from running out of memory.

Rather than revert to the FFI version requiring malloc and free, it instead uses LuaJIT's own memory management, with wrappers to call sodium_memzero when garbage-collected.

This version also adds the crypto_kx functions.

Caveats

libsodium includes functions for secure programming, like allocating memory that avoids swapping, securely zeroing out memory, clearing the stack, and so on.

I'm not sure how possible it is to implement these kinds of functions in Lua. In Lua, I allocate memory using lua_newuserdata or LuaJIT's ffi.new(), so that Lua can keep track of it and garbage collect it. Before releasing temporary memory back to the garbage collector, I do call sodium_memzero to wipe it - but this only applies to scratch memory.

If you're concerned with making absolutely sure memory is cleared out, you should likely code your secure portions in C and use libsodium's secure memory functions, or forego the standard Lua interpreter and write something with a custom allocator that uses sodium_malloc and sodium_free.

Installation

luarocks

Available on luarocks:

luarocks install luasodium

OPM

An FFI-only version is available on OPM

opm install jprjr/luasodium

Arch Linux

Available on the AUR: lua-luasodium.

Builds packages for lua, lua-5.1, lua-5.2, and lua-5.3.

Source

Currently migrating to a CMake build system. Building and installing the library with cmake works, I have not yet moved running tests, generating release tarballs, etc into cmake.

If you'd like to build from source, grab one of the release tarballs, and then build with cmake:

wget https://github.com/jprjr/luasodium/releases/download/v1.3.0/luasodium-1.3.0.tar.gz
tar xf luasodium-1.3.0.tar.gz
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr ../luasodium-1.3.0
make
make install

CMake should find libsodium and Lua automatically. Or you can specify some flags:

-DLUA_VERSION=5.1 (or whichever version of Lua you want to build against.
-DLIBSODIUM_INCLUDEDIR=/path/to/includedir -DLIBSODIUM_LIBRARIES=/path/to/libsodium.so
-DLUA_INCLUDEDIR=/path/to/includedir

If you set LUA_INCLUDEDIR, you'll need to also set LUA_VERSION. If you're building with any version of LuaJIT, set it to 5.1.

Licensing

MIT License (see file LICENSE).

Idioms

This is meant to follow the Libsodium API closely, with a few idioms.

Idiom: Use original symbol names.

All functions and constants use their original, full name from libsodium.

Idiom: Throw errors on programming errors

If a function is missing a parameter or has a wrong parameter type, a Lua error is thrown.

If a call into libsodium returns an error value (example, a message fails to decrypt), then nil is returned.

Idiom: Auto-allocate strings/buffers.

If a libsodium function writes data into a buffer, this library will automatically allocate and return a string.

Idiom: Handle zero-padding

The original NaCl library requires the user to have padding before messages and ciphertexts.

If a libsodium function requires padding, this library will take care of it for you, you'll never need to add padding.

Idiom: strings are immutable.

If a libsodium function changes a buffer, this library will instead make a copy, make changes in that, and return the copy.

Idiom: Use input string length.

If a libsodium function accepts a buffer and a buffer length, the Lua version will just accept a Lua string, you can use string.sub if you need to call a function with a substring.

Idiom examples:

In libsodium, converting a string to hex is:

sodium_bin2hex(char * const hex, const size_t hex_maxlen,
               const unsgined char *const bin, const size_t bin_len);

Since this library will automatically allocate hex, and uses your string's length, the Lua version is simply:

local string = luasodium.sodium_bin2hex(some_other_string)

In libsodium, you can perform addition, subtraction, etc on large integers, these operations are performed on the buffer directly, such as:

char buf[4] = { 0, 0, 0, 0};
sodium_increment(buf,4);
/* buf is now { 1, 0 , 0, 0 } */

In Lua, we instead create a new buffer, copy it, increment, and return that.

local buf = string.rep('\0',4)

local incremented = luasodium.sodium_increment(buf)
-- buf is still '\0\0\0\0', incremented is '\1\0\0\0'

Modules

Luasodium is broken into submodules, though these are mostly used for testing and verification - the recommended approach is to just require luasodium. This will return a module with all functions and constants from the submodules in a single table.

Documentation on modules is available in the wiki.