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Cryptol, Language of Cryptography, Now Available To the Public

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the new-toys-to-play-with dept.

solweil writes to mention that Cryptol, a 'domain specific language for the design, implementation and verification of cryptographic algorithms,' is now available to the public. Cryptol was originally designed for the NSA. It allows for a quick evaluation and continued revisions, and is available for Linux, OS X, and Windows.

7 of 140 comments (clear)

  1. Kudos to NSA by rindeee · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Having worked at the Agency I must say that the quality of the 'product' that they turn over to the public domain is second to none (well, except for that which they keep for themselves of course). They take a lot of heat at a leadership level, some warranted, some not. In the end, the caliber of the engineers, security professionals and JPG (just plain geeks) that work there is second to none. From SEL to crypto bake-offs to the submitter's topic, they've done a helluva lot of good for the community. Thanks guys! Now if they could just get 'Weed Man' to open an omelet shop out in town, all would be right with the world (inside joke, sorry).

    1. Re:Kudos to NSA by caramelcarrot · · Score: 5, Funny

      That "M+" button on your calculator that no-one knows how to use. That's what it does.

    2. Re:Kudos to NSA by collinstocks · · Score: 5, Informative

      Just a correction: Regardless of who developed this (there seems to be some disagreement), nobody turned it over to the public domain. Read the license agreement: it says that you are not allowed to even create derivative works, nor redistribute the program to multiple sources, nor use it for commercial purposes.

  2. really? by gclef · · Score: 5, Funny

    So, wait, the NSA just released math?

    1. Re:really? by BitZtream · · Score: 5, Funny

      Math 2.0

      --
      Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
  3. Interesting for discrite math. by Animats · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Neat. There's some similarity to Matlab, and some to Renderman, and some of the syntax is borrowed from Haskell. The language is compilable to VHDL, so it's possible to generate hardware from the spec. The language is recursive and doesn't support iteration (there's no "for" statement) to make proof of correctness work easier.

    This language might also be useful as a way to express compression algorithms. Reference implementations of the various "zip" algorithms in Cryptol would be useful, and ones for JPEG and MPEG compression, which are often implemented in hardware, even more useful. It's not clear how well Cryptol deals with memory-heavy problems like motion recognition or Hamming table building for compression, though.

  4. Lack of Functionality by burning-toast · · Score: 5, Insightful

    FTFA:
    "The open version does not compile to VHDL, C/C++, or Haskell, and does not produce the formal models used for equivalence checking."

    So does this mean the open version (trial version) which we might have access to does not do much of what it is touted to be good for?

    Just another advertisement for a commercial product methinks. Maybe cool, but still a slashvertisement.

    - Toast