Talk Synopsis
Many people don't like Cryptography. Whenever he falls out of a bar, he carries this strong odor of ivory-towering, bikeshedding and plain, outright arrogance. He seems to be a loner and a smartass, rude, and it's hard to follow his boring, lengthy explanations. But once you get to know him better, it actually turns out that he's really a nice guy. Sure, a little bit paranoid, but his intentions are pure and just. He'll probably never be your buddy on Facebook ('cause he likely won't set up an account in the first place), but over time you will realize that it can be quite pleasant having him around.
Krypt is the tool that tames him, and krypt is the tool that translates his sentences into plain, understandable Ruby. Gone are the times when you just couldn't figure out what parameters to use in order to please him, gone are the times when he would take your passwords and not stow them away safely because yet again he didn't fully understand what you were asking him to do. OK, this metaphor thing is getting a little old now. krypt makes using crypto fun and easy, and it works on all Rubies on all platforms (yep, Windows, too) - out of the box, no restrictions. It is about diversity - it allows you to choose from different providers that are best-suited for the particular task at hand.
You'll get a whirlwind tour of how krypt is different than other crypto libraries and why. You'll find out about the finer pieces of its inner workings and you might take home a few tricks that evolved while developing the native extensions that sit at the very heart of krypt. With its recent integration into JRuby, you might already be using krypt with JRuby right now without even knowing. Learn about the details and how krypt is used to simulate OpenSSL features that were not available in JRuby before. Find out more about how it can help making Ruby a safer place. krypt tries to ultimately replace the OpenSSL extension in the Ruby standard library, and with our combined effort we could actually steer the story of Ruby cryptography towards a happy ending.
Find out how!
Biography
Martin is a freelancer by day, by night he is also a member of ruby-core, one of the maintainers of the Ruby OpenSSL extension and the author of krypt. Cryptography is his passion, and not only after the epiphany he had once realizing that his last name carries "ssl" in it. He's been helping the European Commission to implement a digital signature platform over the past years, and this was also the reason for krypt - so that he could do it in a sane language for once. He recently discovered blogging as a compensation for not haunting other people with lengthy emails anymore.