KLklaussilveira·Dec 19, 2024Submission
Botan: Crypto and TLS for Modern C++
98 points · Open discussionrandombit
botan
C++2017–2024
randombit / botan
botan
Cryptography Toolkit
5Distinct people
5Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
3.4KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Cryptography Toolkit
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
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Also in these discussions
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year5 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2017-05-31 20:10:13 UTC to 2024-12-19 14:58:30 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
What Hacker News says
5 sourcesmentioned in this thread:
C
* Lua https://www.lua.org/source/
* Redis https://github.com/redis/redis (mentioned twice)
* Ruby https://github.com/ruby/ruby
* SQLite https://sqlite.org/src/dir?ci=trunk
C++
* Botan https://github.com/randombit/botan
* ClickHouse https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse
Go
* Go's standard library https://cs.opensource.google/go/go
* HashiCorp repos, particular those by Mitchell https://github.com/hashicorp
F#
* jet.com repos https://github.com/jet?language=f%23
Haskell
* Elm compiler https://github.com/elm/compiler
Lisp
* CL-PPCRE https://github.com/edicl/cl-ppcre/
* Mezzano USB driver https://github.com/froggey/Mezzano/blob/master/drivers/usb/m...
PHP
* Carbon https://github.com/briannesbitt/Carbon
* Laravel https://github.com/laravel/laravel
Python
* pytudes (notebooks) https://github.com/norvig/pytudes
R
*
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sf (ex of functional OOP) https://github.com/r-spatial/sf
Ruby
* Sequel https://github.com/jeremyevans/sequel/
* Sidekiq https://github.com/sidekiq/sidekiq
Rust
* ripgrep https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep
Scala
* fs2 (ex of good type safety) https://github.com/typelevel/fs2
* monix (ex of ugly code with great performance) https://github.com/monix/monix
TypeScript
* GitHub Desktop (ex of SPA) https://github.com/desktop/desktop
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thanks to: cejast, bb86754, wewxjfq, antonyt, bit, diego_moita, agjmills, freedomben, Contortion, valenterry, DethNinja, mberning, seneca
We can relate to that! It is extremely helpful for our current efforts to implement TLS 1.3 for the Botan crypto library. Especially to get a foothold with TLS and gain a feeling for the protocol structure. Amazing work!
https://github.com/randombit/botan/pull/2922
In Implementing a toy version of TLS 1.3Aye, it’s PMULL, and it’s available as part of the ARM Crypto Extensions.
This patch shows that using it can result in a large performance improvement:
https://github.com/randombit/botan/issues/842
In ARM and Intel have different performance characteristics: a case studyMy suggestion after looking around for the best hash function is SHA-256. Not SHA-512, not SHA-512/256. Not even SHA-224 because it offers no performance benefits.
BLAKE2 is a good candidate right now considering speed. But SHA-256 instructions will only get more prevalent which will take care of the speed issue.
There have been speed comparisons between SHA-256 and BLAKE2 without SHA instructions[1]. BLAKE2 seems like good option then, with the optimized code.
But once SHA extensions use hardware instructions, it gets a 5.7x boost which blows BLAKE2 out of the water.[2] There are instructions for SHA-256 in NEON too although I couldn't find any benchmarks. I'd say it'll definitely be faster than BLAKE2 with HW instructions.
Combine that with SHA256 being uber popular everywhere, that'll be one less headache.
I also doubt SHA-256 will be
Read the rest
over thrown in the near future, atleast until SHA-3 instructions become commonplace, which I anticipate will take about a decade from now.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14357197
[2]: https://github.com/randombit/botan/issues/807#issuecomment-2...
EDIT: Looks like SHA-224 might be the best option, considering it has the same core with a truncated output which will make it immune to length-extension attacks.