57 releases
Uses new Rust 2024
| 0.10.0 | Jul 19, 2025 |
|---|---|
| 0.10.0-alpha.1 | Feb 18, 2025 |
| 0.9.6 | Jan 26, 2024 |
| 0.9.4 | Nov 11, 2023 |
| 0.0.1-preview.10 | Mar 21, 2017 |
#14 in Cryptography
608,572 downloads per month
Used in 549 crates
(58 directly)
1MB
3.5K
SLoC
Snow

An implementation of Trevor Perrin's Noise Protocol that is designed to be Hard To Fuck Up™.
🔥 Warning 🔥 This library has not received any formal audit.
What's it look like?
See examples/simple.rs for a more complete TCP client/server example.
let mut noise = snow::Builder::new("Noise_NN_25519_ChaChaPoly_BLAKE2s".parse()?)
.build_initiator()?;
let mut buf = [0u8; 65535];
// write first handshake message
noise.write_message(&[], &mut buf)?;
// receive response message
let incoming = receive_message_from_the_mysterious_ether();
noise.read_message(&incoming, &mut buf)?;
// complete handshake, and transition the state machine into transport mode
let mut noise = noise.into_transport_mode()?;
See the full documentation at https://docs.rs/snow.
Implemented
Snow is currently tracking against Noise spec revision 34.
However, a not all features have been implemented yet (pull requests welcome):
Crypto
Cryptographic providers are swappable through Builder::with_resolver(), but by default
it chooses select, artisanal pure-Rust implementations (see Cargo.toml for a quick
overview).
Other Providers
ring
ring is a crypto library based off of BoringSSL and is significantly faster than most of the pure-Rust implementations.
If you enable the ring-resolver feature, Snow will include a resolvers::ring module
as well as a RingAcceleratedResolver available to be used with
Builder::with_resolver().
If you enable the ring-accelerated feature, Snow will default to choosing ring's
crypto implementations when available.
Resolver primitives supported
| default | ring | |
|---|---|---|
| CSPRNG | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| 25519 | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| 448 | ||
| P-256🏁 | ✔️ | |
| AESGCM | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| ChaChaPoly | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| XChaChaPoly🏁 | ✔️ | |
| SHA256 | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| SHA512 | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| BLAKE2s | ✔️ | |
| BLAKE2b | ✔️ |
[!Note] 🏁 P-256 and XChaChaPoly are not in the official specification of Noise, and thus need to be enabled via the feature flags
use-p256anduse-xchacha20poly1305, respectively.
no_std support and feature selection
Snow can be used in no_std environments if alloc is provided.
By default, Snow uses the standard library, default crypto resolver and a selected collection
of crypto primitives. To use Snow in no_std environments or make other kinds of customized
setups, use Snow with default-features = false. This way you will individually select
the components you wish to use. default-resolver is the only built-in resolver that
currently supports no_std.
To use a custom setup with default-resolver, enable your desired selection of cryptographic primitives:
| Primitive | Feature flag | |
|---|---|---|
| DHs | Curve25519 | use-curve25519 |
| P-256🏁 | use-p256 |
|
| Ciphers | AES-GCM | use-aes-gcm |
| ChaChaPoly | use-chacha20poly1305 |
|
| XChaChaPoly🏁 | use-xchacha20poly1305 |
|
| Hashes | SHA-256 | use-sha2 |
| SHA-512 | use-sha2 |
|
| BLAKE2s | use-blake2 |
|
| BLAKE2b | use-blake2 |
[!Note] 🏁 XChaChaPoly and P-256 are not in the official specification of Noise, but they are supported by Snow.
Example configurations
Curve25519 + AES-GCM + SHA-2 with standard library features.
default-features = false
features = [
"use-curve25519",
"use-aes-gcm",
"use-sha2",
"std",
]
Curve25519 + ChaChaPoly + BLAKE2 without standard library.
default-features = false
features = [
"use-curve25519",
"use-chacha20poly1305",
"use-blake2",
]
getrandom support
Most crypto implementations supported by default-resolver will require
getrandom.
If your target platform is not directly supported you might have to provide a custom implementation in your crate root. Check out their documentation for details.
License
snow is offered with a dual choice-of-license between:
where you may choose either of these licenses to follow for this work.
Contribution
Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.
Dependencies
~0–18MB
~242K SLoC