petanode (Posts about cryptopp)

Random Number Generators in Crypto++

Tsvetomir Dimitrov — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 16:46:24 GMT

Random number generators, or RNGs, are a fundamental part of many cryptographic algorithms, so it's no surprise that Crypto++ provides several RNG implementations. The index of the documentation lists the following algorithms:

Hashing in Crypto++

Tsvetomir Dimitrov — Fri, 02 May 2025 15:21:44 GMT

This posts explores the hashing algorithms available in Crypto++. We will examine how to use them independently and how to integrate them into a pipeline. First, let's review the available implementations. These are listed in the "Hash Functions" section of the documentation index. Notable examples include Blake2s/2b, Keccak, and SHA3. Some algorithms, such as MD5 and MD4, are located in the Weak namespace. As the name implies, these are not secure for production use and are included only for reference.

Source and Sink in Crypto++

Tsvetomir Dimitrov — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 15:05:26 GMT

This post builds upon A Brief Introduction to Crypto++. I suggest to have a quick look at it before diving into Source and Sink classes.

Sources and sinks are quite similar, so we will review them together. Just a refresher: a source provides an input for a Crypto++ pipeline, while a sink terminates it by saving the result to an output. The input and output of a pipeline are usually data containers (e.g., arrays, vectors, strings) or files.

My new Crypto++ ebook

Tsvetomir Dimitrov — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 15:04:40 GMT

EDIT (Jun 5, 2025): Update the details about the book.

My first encounter with Crypto++ was at an old job. I remember struggling to find good material aimed at novice users. I managed to complete my tasks by reading the official documentation, the wiki (which is currently offline), and adapting the existing Crypto++ code in our codebase. However, I missed having a quick, beginner-friendly tutorial that explained the basics of the library and provided short examples of how to use its various algorithms.

To partially address this gap, I wrote a blog post that outlined some Crypto++ usage guidelines and demonstrated them with a code sample. The post garnered some interest, which inspired me to expand the idea into a book:

Brief Introduction to Crypto++

Tsvetomir Dimitrov — Sun, 14 Mar 2021 21:06:01 GMT

At some point in your life as a software engineer you will have to write code involving cryptography (crypto for short). You might need to implement a password authentication system by keeping salted password hashes for your users or add encryption for your custom binary protocol implementation or save some files securely on disk, etc. This is usually harder than it sounds and you will have to use some crypto library to get the job done.

In this post I want to write a really quick and short introduction to Crypto++, a C++ cryptographic library. My first experience with it led a lot of questions. Reading the documentation and googling answers took me some time so I want to share my experience. Hopefully you will find the information in this post helpful and will save you some time.