Charm: A Framework for Rapidly Prototyping Cryptosystems

Опубликовано 17 августа 2016, 2:53

Over the past decade the cryptographic research community has made impressive progress in developing new cryptographic protocols. This work has advanced our understanding of basic technologies such as public key encryption, key agreement, and digital signatures. Moreover, it has given us entirely new paradigms for securing data, such as Attribute Based Encryption, anonymous credentials and techniques for computing on encrypted data. Despite these advances, only a trickle of new cryptographic technology has filtered down to the systems community in the form of useable cryptographic implementations. Even supported prototype research implementations are few and far between. This is a major loss for researchers, to say nothing of industry and the open source community. In this talk we introduce Charm, an extensible Python-based framework for rapidly prototyping cryptographic systems. Charm was designed from the ground up to support the development of advanced cryptographic schemes. It includes support for multiple cryptographic settings, an extensive library of re-usable code, along with the infrastructure necessary to quickly implement interactive protocols. Our framework also provides a series of specialized tools that enable different cryptosystems to interoperate. This paper describes Charm and the various capabilities provided through our modular architecture. Through several examples, we show that our approach produces a potential order of magnitude decrease in code size compared to standard C implementations, while inducing an acceptable performance impact.