Introduction
VA Smalltalk's cryptographic support offers features that can help developers add security to their applications to ensure any/all properties of secure communications (such as data integrity, confidentiality, authentication and non-repudiation) can be realized.
Cryptography in VA Smalltalk is implemented as a feature called ST: Cryptographic Support and offers the following:
•Message Digests
•Symmetric Ciphers
•Public/Private Key
•Digital Signatures
•Digital Envelopes
•Key Agreement
•Key Derivation
•Password Based Encryption
•Message Authentication Code (MAC)
•Secure Random Number Generator
•High-Performance Crypto Data Streaming
•ASN1
•X509
VA Smalltalk's implementation of these cryptographic primitives are a set of high-level library bindings to OpenSSL, a popular open-source implementation of the SSL/TLS protocols.
OpenSSL is implemented as two shared libraries. The first is a generic cryptographic library, which is what VA Smalltalk's cryptographic support utilizes. The second is the SSL/TLS library which is used within the ST: Socket Communications Interface feature to implement secure sockets.
This chapter will help familiarize developers with the cryptographic features that are offered. However, the ST: Cryptographic Support feature also comes with numerous code examples that developers can step through. These examples will be referenced in this chapter since they are the best source for showing how these features work in code. All examples can be found in the OpenSSLCryptoInterfaceExamplesApp which is part of the ST: Cryptographic Support feature.
Last modified date: 08/09/2017