Gibberish AES

A Javascript library for OpenSSL compatible AES encryption

Copyright: Mark Percival 2008 - http://markpercival.us
License: MIT

Thanks to :

• Josh Davis - http://www.josh-davis.org/ecmaScrypt
• Alex Boussinet [email protected]
• Chris Veness - http://www.movable-type.co.uk/scripts/aes.html
• Michel I. Gallant - http://www.jensign.com/
• Kristof Neirynck - http://github.com/Crydust Fixes for IE7, YUI compression, JSLINT errors

Also see:

Gibberish is meant to be compatible for OpenSSL AES on the command line. There are other Javascript crypto libraries out there that may be better suite for your needs. One of the most popular and actively maintained libraries is Stanford's Javascript Crypto Library. It supports more cipher block modes, along with authentication.

Usage

    // GibberishAES.enc(string, password)
    // Defaults to 256 bit encryption
    enc = GibberishAES.enc("This sentence is super secret", "ultra-strong-password");
    alert(enc);
    GibberishAES.dec(enc, "ultra-strong-password");

    // Now change size to 128 bits
    GibberishAES.size(128);
    enc = GibberishAES.enc("This sentence is not so secret", "1234");
    GibberishAES.dec(enc, "1234");

    // And finally 192 bits
    GibberishAES.size(192);
    enc = GibberishAES.enc("I can't decide!!!", "whatever");
    GibberishAES.dec(enc, "whatever");

OpenSSL Interop

In Javascript

    GibberishAES.enc("Made with Gibberish\n", "password");
    // Outputs: "U2FsdGVkX1+21O5RB08bavFTq7Yq/gChmXrO3f00tvJaT55A5pPvqw0zFVnHSW1o"
    

On the command line

    echo "U2FsdGVkX1+21O5RB08bavFTq7Yq/gChmXrO3f00tvJaT55A5pPvqw0zFVnHSW1o" | openssl enc -d -aes-256-cbc -a -k password

Requirements

None.

The library is fully encapsulated, you should be able to drop it into nearly any website. The downside to this is that it grew with the addition of its own Base64 library and MD5 hashing algorithm.

Tests

Click here to run the test package in your browser.

The test script does require JQuery(included), but the basic GibberishAES does not.

Design Factors

It only supports CBC AES encryption mode, and it's built to be compatible with one of the most popular AES libraries available, OpenSSL. It also passed the FIPS certification from NIST.

One of my primary issues with other AES libraries is the lack of support for OpenSSL. One can't expect users to trust a library that's not compatible with a standard like OpenSSL. It's outside the range of many users to audit encryption code, and while compatibility doesn't ensure 100% compliance(especially with asymmetric encryption), one can come pretty close with a symmetric algorithm like AES where the only difference is how OpenSSL picks its random 8 byte salt.

The size of this library is under 25k when it's compressed and I feel that's adequate for most uses. Although I used lookup tables for Galois fields, the cost of the size increase was well offset by the more than 10 fold increase in speed.