//crypto README

This directory contains implementations of crypto primitives for use in Chromium. Most of these are either:

• Wrappers around platform-specific APIs (DPAPI, libsecret, etc), so that code elsewhere in Chromium can use cross-platform abstractions, or
• Wrappers around BoringSSL APIs that use Chromium-native types like base::span and similar

There is very little actual cryptographic code in //crypto - it is mostly wrappers.

This directory is actively being refactored as of 2025-06. See PLAN.md.

Commonly-Used Interfaces

• AEAD: crypto/aead
• Hashing: crypto/hash
• HMACs: crypto/hmac
• Key derivation: crypto/kdf
• Public / private keys: crypto/keypair
• Randomness: crypto/random
• Signatures: crypto/sign

Many interfaces in this directory are deprecated and being changed or removed; check the comment at the top of the header file before using them.

Recommended Primitives & Constructions

If you are designing a new protocol in Chromium using cryptography, these are our recommended primitives and constructions to use. They balance performance with security, are “post-quantum”, and have reasonably well-understood margins of safety.

• If you need to encrypt to a public key, use HPKE with ML-KEM-768, HKDF-SHA256, and AES-128-GCM via crypto/hpke.
• If you need to encrypt to a symmetric key, use AES-128-GCM via crypto/aead.
• If you need to sign with a private key, use ML-DSA-44 via crypto/sign.
• If you need to sign with a symmetric key, use HMAC-SHA256 via crypto/hmac.
• If you need to hash, use SHA256 via crypto/hash.
• If you need to do key exchange, use ML-KEM-768, which does not yet have a //crypto API. TODO(https://crbug.com/549892109): add one.

Advice For Clients

• Ciphertext, keys, certificates, and other cryptographic material are generally sequences of bytes, not characters, so prefer using byte-oriented types to represent them: vector<uint8_t>, array<uint8_t>, and span<uint8_t> rather than string and string_view.
• To serialize private keys, use keypair::PrivateKey::ToPrivateKeyInfo(), which returns a PKCS#8 PrivateKeyInfo structure serialized as a byte vector. To unserialize keys in this format, use keypair::PrivateKey::FromPrivateKeyInfo().
• To serialize public keys, use keypair::PublicKey::ToSubjectPublicKeyInfo() or keypair::PrivateKey::ToSubjectPublicKeyInfo(), which return a X.509 SubjectPublicKeyInfo structure serialized as a byte vector. To unserialize public keys in this format, use keypair::PublicKey::FromSubjectPublicKeyInfo().
• SubjectPublicKeyInfo and PrivateKeyInfo can represent many kinds of keys, so code that expects a specific kind of key must check the kind after deserialization.
• To serialize symmetric keys (AEAD, HMAC, or symmetric encryption keys), use a raw sequence of bytes for the key material. Represent these keys in memory using vector<uint8_t>, array<uint8_t>, or span<uint8_t> directly.