Charm: a framework for rapidly prototyping cryptosystems

We describe Charm, an extensible framework for rapidly prototyping cryptographic systems. Charm provides a number of features that explicitly support the development of new protocols, including support for modular composition of cryptographic building blocks, infrastructure for developing interactiv...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Journal of cryptographic engineering Vol. 3; no. 2; pp. 111 - 128
Main Authors:	Akinyele, Joseph A., Garman, Christina, Miers, Ian, Pagano, Matthew W., Rushanan, Michael, Green, Matthew, Rubin, Aviel D.
Format:	Journal Article
Language:	English
Published:	Berlin/Heidelberg Springer-Verlag 01-06-2013
Subjects:	Circuits and Systems Communications Engineering Computer Communication Networks Computer Science Cryptology Data Structures and Information Theory Networks Operating Systems Regular Paper Privacy Protocols Software Applied cryptography
Online Access:	Get full text
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Summary:	We describe Charm, an extensible framework for rapidly prototyping cryptographic systems. Charm provides a number of features that explicitly support the development of new protocols, including support for modular composition of cryptographic building blocks, infrastructure for developing interactive protocols, and an extensive library of re-usable code. Our framework also provides a series of specialized tools that enable different cryptosystems to interoperate. We implemented over 40 cryptographic schemes using Charm, including some new ones that, to our knowledge, have never been built in practice. This paper describes our modular architecture, which includes a built-in benchmarking module to compare the performance of Charm primitives to existing C implementations. We show that in many cases our techniques result in an order of magnitude decrease in code size, while inducing an acceptable performance impact. Lastly, the Charm framework is freely available to the research community and to date, we have developed a large, active user base.
ISSN:	2190-8508 2190-8516
DOI:	10.1007/s13389-013-0057-3