Enhancement ideas taken from the ursa module

[mattcollier]

openssl is currently broken in atom-shell, so I'm in the hunt for alternatives. I'm a big fan of your ths module, so I thought I would take a look at node-cryptopp.

As you are probably aware the ursa module only exposes the RSA functions of openssl, so the fact that this module expands the available encryption options is good.

Looking at the RSA functions available in node-cryptopp I'm not seeing (or overlooking) some nice features found in the ursa module.

• ability to read/write PEM encoded strings key storage and public key exchange.
• ability to specify the encoding of ciphertext for encoding/decoding operations. It appears that hex is the only encoding available right now.
• ursa provides methods/functions on a 'key' object for encryption/decryption/signing instead of passing in the various components of the key. I wonder if some of these convenience methods could be provided by the node wrapper.

I also appreciate that you have given consideration to protecting the key information in-memory.

[abenmrad]

Thanks for your interest :)

Answering your points one by one :

• Indeed, PEM encoding/decoding is not currently available
• When you are not using the KeyRing object, the only output/input encoding is indeed the hexadecimal encoding. However, if you do use the KeyRing, you can specify either hex or base64 encoding for each method call (in a very unclear way I must admit).
• If you use the KeyRing, the objects wraps the keypair and only provide methods for each operation where your private key is involved. For public key operations, as of now there is no other way to use the module aside passing each key component one by one.

I know this rather (very) badly built and thought out, as this was my first nodejs module and among my first real projects in C++. node-cryptopp needs a major redesign, hopefully leading to something more consistent like node-sodium, where buffers are used a default data encoding to begin with.

Just out of curiosity, have you tried node-cryptopp inside atom-shell yet? Does it work?