[HN Gopher] A Vulnerability in Libsodium
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A Vulnerability in Libsodium
Author : raggi
Score : 144 points
Date : 2025-12-30 17:24 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (00f.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (00f.net)
| CiPHPerCoder wrote:
| This also affected the PHP library, sodium_compat.
| https://github.com/FriendsOfPHP/security-advisories/pull/756
|
| I'm planning to spend my evening checking every other Ed25519
| implementation I can find to see if this check is missing any
| where else in the open source ecosystem.
| hu3 wrote:
| Thank you for your work on open source.
| CiPHPerCoder wrote:
| I found several libraries that simply didn't implement the
| check, but none that implemented in incorrectly in the same way
| as the vulnerability discussed above.
|
| If you didn't receive an email from me, either your
| implementation isn't listed on
| https://ianix.com/pub/ed25519-deployment.html, I somehow missed
| it, or you're safe.
| proof_by_vibes wrote:
| I've been iterating on sodium bindings in Lean4 for about four
| months, and now that I've gotten to Ristretto255 I can see why
| the author is excited about its potential. Ristretto is a tightly
| designed API that allows me to build arbitrary polynomials on
| Curve25519 and I've been having a blast tinkering and
| experimenting with it! If the author by chance reads this, just
| want to say thank you for your work!
| fshacf wrote:
| You have a public repo of this?
| gafferongames wrote:
| Such a great library. Thank you Frank Denis
| theLiminator wrote:
| If you work for a big company, consider trying to get Frank
| sponsored by your company.
| guessmyname wrote:
| I work for a big company (Apple) but I have no idea who Frank
| is, nor how to sponsor them; and even if I knew them and how to
| sponsor them, the money would come directly from my pocket
| instead of Apple's banking account.
| CiPHPerCoder wrote:
| From the article: If libsodium is useful to
| you, please keep in mind that it is maintained by one person,
| for free, in time I could spend with my family or on other
| projects. The best way to help the project would be to
| consider sponsoring it, which helps me dedicate more time to
| improving it and making it great for everyone, for many more
| years to come.
|
| The "sponsoring it" links to
| https://opencollective.com/libsodium/contribute
|
| Hope that helps.
| FiloSottile wrote:
| Frank does great work that is critical to many businesses,
| and should get funded to do it professionally.
|
| However, donating money to an open collective is
| prohibitively hard for most big companies. Maybe the world
| should be different (or maybe not, since it would be easy
| for employees to embezzle money if they could direct
| donations easily), but that's how it works currently.
|
| AFAICT, there is also no fiscal sponsor, so the donation
| matching suggested in a sister comment won't apply.
|
| This is why Geomys (https://geomys.org) works the way it
| does, and why it has revenue (ignoring the FIPS and tlog
| sides of the business) which is 30-50x of some GitHub
| Sponsors "success stories": we bill in a way that's
| compatible with how companies do business, even if
| effectively we provide a similar service (which is 95%
| focused on upstream maintenance, not customer support).
|
| I am not saying it's for everyone, or that Frank should
| necessarily adopt this model, or that it's the only way
| (e.g. the Zig foundation raises real amounts of money,
| too), but I find it frustrating to see over and over again
| the same conversation:
|
| - "Alice does important maintenance work, she should get
| professionally funded for it!"
|
| - "How does Alice accept/request funding?"
|
| - "Monthly credit card transactions anchored at $100/mo
| that are labeled donations"
|
| - _no business can move professional amounts of money that
| way_
|
| - "Businesses are so short-sighted, it's a tragedy of the
| commons!"
| AndyKelley wrote:
| Maybe you don't know this but Apple has a donation-matching
| program. If you make donations to non-profits through some
| special internal mechanism, the company will send a donation
| of equal value (up to some limit). If I recall correctly the
| limit is 30K USD per person.
| zenmac wrote:
| Do you have any links or more info about the special
| internal mechanism? Would need an apple employee to
| initiate this I assume?
| squigz wrote:
| "When you give money to an eligible organization, we'll
| match your donations one-for-one, so your $1 has the
| impact of $2. And if you choose to donate your time,
| we'll contribute $25 for every hour you volunteer.
| Whether you donate time or money, Apple will match your
| contributions up to $10,000 a year."
|
| https://www.apple.com/careers/us/life-at-
| apple/benefits.html
| runtimepanic wrote:
| Subtle but important bug. This is a good example of how "is
| valid" checks in crypto are rarely as simple as they sound.
| Accepting points outside the prime-order subgroup can quietly
| undermine higher-level assumptions, even if no immediate exploit
| is obvious. Also a reminder that low-level primitives tend to be
| reused far more widely than intended, so small validation gaps
| can have surprisingly large blast radii.
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