jsf0/hoplite

small GPG-like utility using TweetNaCL and Argon2

DISCLAIMER: I made every effort to write this securely but I can't make any guarantees. Use it at your own risk. This is an alpha version. I will probably make changes that are not backwards compatible. Don't use it on anything you want to decrypt later just yet.

Introduction

hoplite is a small file encryption and signing utility roughly inspired by GPG/PGP, but compiles with no dependencies. It offers a more or less similar syntax for encryption, decryption, signing, and verification. It uses Dan Bernstein's TweetNaCL crypto library, thus it only uses modern, high speed crypto primitives and all encryption is authenticated by default. However, this means it is not backwards-compatible with GPG/PGP (probably a feature, not a bug).

Compiling

Simply run the following:

	$ make
	# make install

hoplite should compile on most Unix-like systems without any dependencies. It has been tested and confirmed to work on the following operating systems:

• OpenBSD
• FreeBSD
• Dragonfly BSD
• Ubuntu
• Fedora
• macOS
• Windows (via Cygwin)

Usage

See the man page (hoplite.1) for full usage examples.

You will need to create a new set of keys (invoked with the -n option) when you first use hoplite for signing/verifying or asymmetric encryption/decryption. This will create 2 keypairs, a pair of Curve25519 keys for encryption/decryption and a pair of Ed25519 keys for signing. It takes your desired key ID (name, email, etc) as its only required option. Secret keys will be separately encrypted and you will be asked to provide a passphrase for each.

Passphrases are read from the tty by default. The -S option will cause hoplite to read them from stdin, making it easier to use hoplite in a script. However, this exposes your passphrase to anyone who can run ps on your machine, so use it with care.

Key generation and symmetric encryption (using the "-c" option) will derive the encryption key from a passphrase, using Argon2i. The rounds parameter for Argon2 can be invoked with "-r" and the amount of RAM used, in mebibytes, can be specified with the "-m" option. The defaults below are used if you do not specify anything.

• Default rounds: 3
• Default mem: 448 MiB
• Default number of threads: 4
• Min rounds: 3
• Max rounds: 1024
• Min mem: 56 MiB
• Max mem: 64 GiB

The defaults work well for fast machines with plenty of RAM, but are potentially very slow on older single core devices, and will not work at all on devices with less than the chosen amount of RAM free. Pick the largest values that are tolerable for your hardware.

Threat Model

hoplite is designed to secure data that is (or will be) in transit or sitting on a remote server. Secret keys are encrypted, however, they should ideally be kept offline. They remain vulnerable to weak passwords or an attacker with the ability to capture your password. Securing your machine against such an attacker is beyond the scope of hoplite.

Primitives used

• Signing: Ed25519
• Asymmetric key exchange: X25519 key exchange with Curve25519 keys
• Symmetric cipher: XSalsa20-Poly1305
• Password-based key derivation: Argon2i version 1.3
• Random number generation: arc4random on OpenBSD and macOS. /dev/urandom everywhere else

Limitations

• There is no forward secrecy. A given sender/receiver pair will calculate the same shared secret for all of their messages.

• hoplite does not manage keys for you. This is a problem that is likely beyond the ability of a command line utility to handle properly.

As always, if you do find a security problem or bug, comments, advice, and/or patches are welcome and appreciated. Thanks!