saltstack / saltstack/salt

[TECH DEBT] Cryptography APIs

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#63,066 3 comments 2 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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dependency security tech-debt
Dominant language
Python
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Description

Description of the tech debt to be addressed, include links and screenshots

Looking into the cryptographic APIs that are used throughout the code base I noticed pycryptodomex is a hard dependency and M2Crypto is apparently not. The reason to bring this up is that, for example, in salt/crypt.py M2Crytpo is favoured over Cryptodome.

Also in modules like TLS pyOpenSSL is used instead of pyca/cryptography, as recommended by the Python Cryptographic Authority.

Would it make sense to use just one cryptography library to reduce maintenance cost? pyca/cryptography seems to have a more thriving community and more activity than M2Crypto.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reviewing requirements/crypto.txt, salt/crypt.py, and salt/modules/tls.py to inventory the cryptographic libraries currently used and where each is preferred. Trace their callers and dependencies before defining a migration scope. Done would require an agreed single-library direction and a validated plan for updating the affected APIs and requirements.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
python
Domain
security
Issue type
Refactor
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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