Intro

The go-ecies implements the Elliptic Curve Integrated Encryption Scheme.

This is a fork from the umbracle/ecies, who did great job to extract the ECIES encryption from the go-ethereum package.

The package is designed to be compliant with the appropriate NIST standards, and therefore doesn't support the full SEC 1 algorithm set.

Status

The ECIES should is ready for use. It is already used as is in the Foundries.io projects (e.g. foundriesio/fioconfig) for the encryption of device configuration files.

The ASN.1 support is only complete so far, as to support the listed algorithms before.

The public interface allows to implement the HSM support e.g. via the integration with the ThalesIgnite PKCS11 provider.

Supported Ciphers

A list of supported curves was selected based on NIST SP 800-186 Draft. Thus, for example, the Koblitz curves (secpXXXk1 in SEC 2) are not supported by Golang and not recommended by NIST.

Note: If one wants to use the Koblitz curves with this package, their minimal implementation can be found in e.g. https://github.com/decred/dcrd/blob/master/dcrec/secp256k1/ellipticadaptor.go.

The default symmetric cipher and hash parameters are the following:

+-------+-------------+---------+--------------+
| Curve |    Cipher   |  Hash   |   Auth Tag   |
+-------+-------------+---------+--------------+
| P-256 | AES-128-CTR | SHA-256 | HMAC-SHA-256 |
+-------+-------------+---------+--------------+
| P-384 | AES-192-CTR | SHA-384 | HMAC-SHA-384 |
+-------+-------------+---------+--------------+
| P-521 | AES-256-CTR | SHA-512 | HMAC-SHA-512 |
+-------+-------------+---------+--------------+

The P-224 curve is not supported. As per SEC 1 section 3.11 guidance it is too weak to protect sensitive data beyond 2030. The P-256 is currently the default curve supported by the Foundries.io LmP platform. So, we recommend to use P-256 default parameters from the above table unless you have a specific requirement for a stronger encryption strength.

The key derivation function used: NIST SP 800-56c Concatenation KDF.

The CMAC based message tag and the CBC cipher schema are currently not supported.

Benchmark

The most recent test benchmark results:

goos: linux
goarch: amd64
pkg: github.com/umbracle/ecies
cpu: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-9750H CPU @ 2.60GHz
BenchmarkGenerateKeyP256      61060    17358 ns/op
BenchmarkGenSharedKeyP256     17931    67049 ns/op
BenchmarkEncrypt1KbP256       10000    100334 ns/op
BenchmarkDecrypt1KbP256       14184    105888 ns/op

License

The go-ecies is released under the same license as the Go source code. See the LICENSE file for details.

Reference

SEC 1 v2: Standards for Efficient Cryptography: Elliptic Curve Cryptography. Certicom Research. May 2009. http://www.secg.org/sec1-v2.pdf
SEC 2 v2: Standards for Efficient Cryptography: Recommended Elliptic Curve Domain Parameters. Certicom Research. January 2010. https://www.secg.org/sec2-v2.pdf
NIST SP 800-186 Draft: Recommendations for Discrete Logarithm-Based Cryptography: Elliptic Curve Domain Parameters. National Institute of Standards and Technology, October 2019. https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/sp/800-186/draft
NIST SP 800-56a Rev 3: Recommendation for Pair-Wise Key Establishment Schemes Using Discrete Logarithm Cryptography. National Institute of Standards and Technology, April 2018. https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/sp/800-56a/rev-3/final
NIST SP 800-56c Rev 2: Recommendation for Key-Derivation Methods in Key-Establishment Schemes. National Institute of Standards and Technology. August 2020. https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/sp/800-56c/rev-2/final

# README