Haskell crypto

Alexander Klimov alserkli at inbox.ru
Sun Nov 20 03:54:37 EST 2005


On Sat, 19 Nov 2005, Ian G wrote:

> Someone mailed me with this question, anyone know
> anything about Haskell?

It is a *purely* functional programming language.
<http://www.haskell.org/aboutHaskell.html>

> -------- Original Message --------
>
> I just recently stepped into open source cryptography directly, rather
> than just as a user.  I'm writing a SHA-2 library completely in
> Haskell, which I recently got a thing for in a bad way.  Seems to me
> that nearly all of the message digest implementations out there are
> written in C/C++, or maybe Java or in hw as an ASIC, but I can't find
> any in a purely functional programming language, let alone in one that
> can have properties of programs proved.

TTBOMK the main reason why people write low-level crypto in something
other than C is for integration simplification (e.g., there is a lisp
sha1 implementation in the emacs distribution): IMO it is pointless to
write SHA in a language that ``can have properties of programs
proved,'' because test vectors are good enough, and there is no real
assurance that when you write the specification in a machine-readable
form you do not make the same mistake as in your code.

BTW, there is low-level crypto in Haskell as well:
<http://web.comlab.ox.ac.uk/oucl/work/ian.lynagh/sha1/haskell-sha1-0.1.0/>

-- 
Regards,
ASK

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