On Mar 18, 2011, at 4:53 PM, Brendan Eich wrote:

> On Mar 18, 2011, at 12:56 PM, Shabsi Walfish wrote:
> 
>> I'm not convinced that this use case, or any other use case I could think of 
>> for the web (with the possible exception of DRM/encryption on streaming 
>> media), would really benefit from speed. On the whole, you would most likely 
>> be encrypting fairly small quantities of data, and any larger quantities of 
>> data would typically be handled in a context where the encryption/decryption 
>> can even be done asynchronously. Even on a mobile phone, a few blocks of AES 
>> could probably done in pure JS without noticeable delay. Have you done any 
>> experiments with SJCL ( http://crypto.stanford.edu/sjcl/ ) for example?
> 
> In support of Robert's point, we have Firefox Sync [1],

[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox_Sync
[2] http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/mobile/sync/

at least. Sorry for leaving these off last time.

/be

> which client-side encrypts many blocks of user data (not just passwords; 
> cookies, history, etc.) to hide it from our own (or an alternative; the 
> server is open source) sync service.
> 
> This needs native speed, which we provide via privileged-JS-only (our 
> so-called "chrome" user-interface JS) access to our native crypto module 
> (NSS). The volume in blocks and bytes requires it. Using pure-JS crypto 
> lowers performance an order of magnitude or two.
> 
> To your point about the API being "best, most current" crypto-standard (for a 
> given key size, perhaps): that is usable but often in our modern era, JS 
> clients must chat with JS server peers using precisely *this* or *that* 
> crypto protocol. So I imagine we'll need both kinds of APIs: best-latest and 
> exactly-this.
> 
> Mark Miller alluded to a crypto API task group without Ecma TC39. I'm open to 
> it, provided we can include some of the domain experts who have participated 
> on this list (but who may not be employed by Ecma members).
> 
> /be
> 
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