Google has announced the launch of the Project Wycheproof that includes more than 80 test cases and targets cryptography problems. Named after the smallest mountain in the world, Moun Wycheproof, this project’s main motivation is to have an achievable goal – “the smaller the mountain the easier it is to climb it!”.
As Google’s security engineers, Daniel Bleichenbacher and Thai Duong explain, in cryptography, even small mistakes can have catastrophic consequences. Making the problem worse is the fact that mistakes in open source cryptographic software libraries repeat often and remain undiscovered for too long. And because this is what is used to encrypt the transmission of data across the internet, it’s crucial to find a solution, fix, and whenever possible, prevent cryptographic mistakes.
“Our first set of tests are written in Java, because Java has a common cryptographic interface. This allowed us to test multiple providers with a single test suite,” Google’s blog states.
Project Wycheproof will develop as many tests as possible in order to check the most popular cryptographic algorithms and software libraries that support them. In fact, the blog states that external contributors are welcome too, as Project Wycheproof is “by no means complete”.
Source:
Google Online Security Blog (https://security.googleblog.com/2016/12/project-wycheproof.html)
Digital Trends (http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/google-project-whcheproof-cryptographic-tests-libraries-algorithms/)
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