From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1751446AbaKIBSh (ORCPT ); Sat, 8 Nov 2014 20:18:37 -0500 Received: from mail.eperm.de ([89.247.134.16]:54296 "EHLO mail.eperm.de" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751232AbaKIBSf (ORCPT ); Sat, 8 Nov 2014 20:18:35 -0500 X-AuthUser: sm@eperm.de From: Stephan Mueller To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-crypto@vger.kernel.org, cryptography@metzdowd.com Cc: Herbert Xu Subject: libkcapi: First release of kernel crypto API userspace library Date: Sun, 09 Nov 2014 02:18:28 +0100 Message-ID: <1800633.p8UcYzvYGX@tachyon.chronox.de> User-Agent: KMail/4.14.2 (Linux/3.17.2-300.fc21.x86_64; KDE/4.14.2; x86_64; ; ) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7Bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Hi, The Linux kernel exports a Netlink interface of type AF_ALG to allow user space to utilize the kernel crypto API. libkcapi uses this Netlink interface and exports easy to use APIs so that a developer does not need to consider the low-level Netlink interface handling. Its first release is available at [1]. The library does not implement any cipher algorithms. All consumer requests are sent to the kernel for processing. Results from the kernel crypto API are returned to the consumer via the library API. The kernel interface and therefore this library can be used by unprivileged processes. As the library is small, it may even be included directly into a consuming application instead of using it as a shared library. The library together with the kernel allows the use of symmetric ciphers as well as message digests and keyed message digests. Patches are prepared for submission to LKML to allow AEAD ciphers and RNGs to be used from userspace. [1] http://www.chronox.de/libkcapi.html -- Ciao Stephan