Security

This section has security-relevant information regarding orion.

Memory:

orion has a best-effort approach to wiping sensitive memory. There are known obstacles for ensuring effective memory wiping using Rust (from zeroize):

However, be aware that Rust's current memory semantics (e.g. move) can leave copies of data in memory, and there isn't presently a good solution for ensuring all copies of data on the stack are properly cleared.

Due to such limitations, orion offers no guarantees that all sensitive memory is wiped. orion also makes no attempts to avoid sensitive memory being written to the system swap space.

Side-channel attacks:

orion only aims to protect against timing-based side-channel vulnerabilities.

No unsafe code:

orion itself forbids the use of so-called “unsafe” code, meaning that all memory-safety guarantees provided by Rust are enforced at compile-time. However, even though orion itself does not allow unsafe code, it is used in some of its dependencies.

These are metrics that give an overview of which dependencies use unsafe code and how much:

Metric output format: x/y
x = unsafe code used by the build
y = total unsafe code found in the crate

Functions  Expressions  Impls  Traits  Methods  Dependency

0/0        0/0          0/0    0/0     0/0        orion v0.8.0 (**omitted**)
0/1        214/224      0/0    0/0     0/0      ☢ ├── byteorder v1.2.6
0/0        146/146      0/0    0/0     0/0      ☢ ├── rand v0.5.5
0/0        0/0          0/0    0/0     0/0        │   ├── libc v0.2.40
0/0        41/41        0/0    0/0     0/0      ☢ │   └── rand_core v0.2.0
1/1        36/83        0/0    1/1     1/4      ☢ ├── seckey v0.9.1
27/27      0/0          0/0    0/0     0/0      ☢ │   └── memsec v0.5.4
0/0        10/10        0/0    0/0     0/0      ☢ ├── sha2 v0.8.0
1/1        2/2          0/0    0/0     0/0      ☢ │   ├── block-buffer v0.7.0
0/0        0/0          0/0    0/0     0/0        │   │   ├── block-padding v0.1.2
0/0        10/10        0/0    0/0     0/0      ☢ │   │   │   └── byte-tools v0.3.0
0/0        10/10        0/0    0/0     0/0      ☢ │   │   ├── byte-tools v0.3.0
0/1        214/224      0/0    0/0     0/0      ☢ │   │   ├── byteorder v1.2.6
1/1        198/198      18/18  8/8     5/5      ☢ │   │   └── generic-array v0.12.0
0/0        51/51        0/0    0/0     0/0      ☢ │   │       └── typenum v1.10.0
0/0        0/0          0/0    0/0     0/0        │   ├── digest v0.8.0
1/1        198/198      18/18  8/8     5/5      ☢ │   │   └── generic-array v0.12.0
0/0        0/0          0/0    0/0     0/0        │   ├── fake-simd v0.1.2
0/0        0/0          0/0    0/0     0/0        │   └── opaque-debug v0.2.1
                                                  │   [dev-dependencies]
0/0        0/0          0/0    0/0     0/0        │   └── digest v0.8.0
0/0        1/1          0/0    0/0     0/0      ☢ ├── subtle v1.0.0
0/0        13/13        0/0    0/0     0/0      ☢ └── tiny-keccak v1.4.2
0/0        0/0          0/0    0/0     0/0            └── crunchy v0.1.6
                                                  [dev-dependencies]
0/0        0/0          0/0    0/0     0/0        ├── hex v0.3.2
0/2        0/371        0/12   0/4     0/0        └── ring v0.13.2
0/0        0/17         0/2    0/0     0/0            ├── lazy_static v1.0.1
0/0        0/0          0/0    0/0     0/0            ├── libc v0.2.40
0/0        0/0          0/0    0/0     0/0            └── untrusted v0.6.2
                                                      [build-dependencies]
0/0        0/162        0/2    0/0     0/4            └── cc v1.0.9

These metrics were made using cargo-geiger.

Third-party security audit:

orion has not yet received any formal security audit.