When looking at cryptographic support in Ruby I was pleased to see the breadth of cryptographic features provided by the openssl module. However, I was also surprised to see that performing simple operations such as encrypting or hashing a string required a number of interactions with the openssl module. Furthermore, using the API correctly and securely to perform these simple operations requires some care.

The Gibberish gem provides a nice wrapper around openssl and presents a very clean and simple API for performing simple operations such as AES encryption/decryption, digest generation and HMAC generation.

For example, encrypting some text with Gibberish:

# AES encryption (defaults to AES-256-CBC
cipher = Gibberish::AES.new("p4ssw0rd")
cipher.enc("Some top secret data")

Compared to the same operation with openssl:

c = OpenSSL::Cipher::Cipher.new("aes-256-cbc")
c.encrypt
salt = generate_salt
c.pkcs5_keyivgen("p4ssw0rd", salt, 1)
e = c.update("Some top secret data") + c.final
e = "Salted__#{salt}#{e}" #OpenSSL compatible

Some of the problems related to correctly using the openssl library has arisen from poor documentation in earlier versions of Ruby. Eric Hodel has put a lot of effort into improving this documentation in the latest versions of Ruby.

Further searching for Ruby cryptographic libraries yields a pure ruby implementation called crypt and another wrapper around openssl called ezcrypto. Crypt performance is lower than openssl due to the pure ruby implementation and the last update was a good while ago. Ezcrypto also seems functional but I prefer the style of the Gibberish API.

In summary, Gibberish seems to be the best option for common cryptographic operations with openssl as the fallback for any features not exposed through the Gibberish wrapper.