[Mono-dev] About System.Core.dll System.Security.Cryptography and Cng

[Juho Vähä-Herttua]

16.2.2011 15:39, Sebastien Pouliot kirjoitti:
> Hello Juho,
>
> On Wed, 2011-02-16 at 12:19 +0200, Juho Vähä-Herttua wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I have implemented elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) algorithms on .NET
>> by using the BigInteger struct from .NET 4.0. On Fp curves they seem to
>> be considerably faster (about twice the speed) than the BouncyCastle
>> library http://www.bouncycastle.org/csharp/ I used for comparison. This
>> is probably mostly because of the speed of the BigInteger
>> implementation, because I don't see much difference in the actual
>> arithmetics.
>>
>> I have also implemented most of the Cng related enumerations in
>> System.Security.Cryptography
> iirc we already part them (or part of them in our git repository)

I saw CngAlgorithm and CngAlgorithmGroup, those are only 2 of the 23 
classes I would need (if I counted them right).

>> and reverse engineered some
>> ECDiffieHellmanCng class functionality where the documentation is not
>> clear.
> "reverse engineered" means a lot of things to different people. Can you
> elaborate on this and ensure it's in compliance with:
>
> http://www.mono-project.com/Contributing#Important_Rules

In this context I meant trial-and-error and Microsoft documentation, the 
ECDiffieHellmanCng class should just be a wrapper to the native Cng API 
anyway, so I doubt decompilation would help anything. I'll review those 
rules and my code and try to make sure it complies with all the 
requirements.

>> I could send these upstream to Mono, but since there are a lot of
>> files to be added, I'd like to know how should I proceed.
> That would be great :) and a patch will be fine (for review). But first
> please read both:
> http://www.mono-project.com/Contributing
> and
> http://www.mono-project.com/Coding_Guidelines

Thank you for the links, I've tried to follow the code style I have seen 
in other Mono classes, but I'll go through the guidelines while 
reviewing the code myself.

>> should I write some tests before they
>> can be accepted?
> Yes, definitively! Unit tests (nunit) are required to ensure it works
> correctly (on both MS and Mono runtimes) and ensure no future
> regressions.

Ok, I'll have to look into this after I've finished the required 
functionality in the code.

>> Does Novell have some copyright policy I should
>> consider? Releasing them with the MIT license shouldn't be a problem.
> Our class libraries are MIT.X11 licensed, so as long as you can release
> this code with that license there should not be any problem.

Ok.

I also have some questions I might need advice with. The Cng classes 
have functions and properties like 
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb298399.aspx that return a 
SafeNCryptSecretHandle. This should be a handle to the native 
cryptography API, but it's completely useless in Mono. Since 
SafeNCryptSecretHandle is not implemented, I just dropped those methods 
completely. How should I proceed in this kind of case?

Another thing I had to do is that I am throwing exceptions in case 
someone tries persistent key storage, all the keys in my implementation 
are ephemeral. (but can be serialized into a file and made persistent 
that way) Since Mono is not using the real key storage of .NET I suppose 
this should be ok?


Juho