Re: [PATCH net-next v6 00/23] WireGuard: Secure Network Tunnel

Richard Weinberger
2018-10-05T13:38:13Z

On Fri, Oct 5, 2018 at 3:14 PM Jason A. Donenfeld <Jason@zx2c4.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 3, 2018 at 8:49 AM Eric Biggers <ebiggers@kernel.org> wrote:
> > It's not really about the name, though. It's actually about the whole way of
> > thinking about the submission. Is it a new special library with its own things
> > going on, or is it just some crypto helper functions? It's really just the
> > latter, but you've been presenting it as the former
>
> No, it really is its own thing with important differences from the
> present crypto api. Zinc's focus is on simplicity and clarity. To the
> extent that we're at all tangled with the current crypto api, the goal
> is to untangle as much as possible. It intends to be a small and
> lightweight set of routines, whose relationships are obvious, and with
> this direct and to the point organization, as well as work with the larger
> cryptography community and with academia to invite collaboration. With
> this comes a different way of maintaining it, with higher standards
> and a preference for different implementations than the current
> situation. With Zinc, you have an obvious series of C function calls
> composing the whole thing, without complicated indirection. It's
> something that could be trivially lifted out into a userspace library,
> and used broadly, for example -- something I'll probably do at some
> point. That's a bit of a design change to the current crypto api, and
> sprinkling some direct function calls within the current crypto api's
> complicated enterprise situation would only kick the can further down
> the road, as much complexity would still remain. The goal is to move
> away from behemoth enterprise APIs, and large and complex codebases to
> a simple and direct way of doing things. This desire to untangle, to
> start from a simpler base, and to generally do things differently
> means it will go into lib/zinc/ and include/zinc/ and have different
> maintainers.

So we will have two competing crypo stacks in the kernel?

Having a lightweight crypto API is a good thing but I really don't like the idea
of having zinc parallel to the existing crypto stack.
And I strongly vote that Herbert Xu shall remain the maintainer of the whole
crypto system (including zinc!) in the kernel.

--
Thanks,
//richard