Keyczar: Safe and Simple Cryptography
August 11th, 2008 | Published in Google Online Security
Cryptography is notoriously hard to get right and if improperly used, can create serious security holes. Common mistakes include using the wrong cipher modes or obsolete algorithms, composing primitives in an unsafe manner, hard-coding keys in source code, or failing to anticipate the need for future key rotation. With these risks in mind, we're pleased to announce the open-source release of Keyczar.Keyczar is a cryptographic toolkit that supports encryption and authentication for both symmetric and public-key algorithms. It addresses some of the aforementioned issues by choosing safe defaults, tagging outputs with key version information, and providing a simple application programming interface. Keyczar's key versioning system makes it easy to rotate and revoke keys, without worrying about backward compatibility or making any changes to source code.
We look forward to working with the open source community and continuing to make cryptography safer and easier to use. To download Keyczar or for more information, please visit our Google Code project and discussion group.