crypto workbench

Moving from a whitepaper or RFC to a production-ready cryptographic implementation is prone to subtle errors and security flaws. This skill enforces a rigorous, staged workflow to ensure every primitive, notation, and security assumption is documented before a single line of code is written.

What it does

• Source extraction scans PDFs and RFCs to build notation maps and identify ambiguities in cryptographic specifications.
• Library mapping matches required primitives to established libraries like OpenSSL, NaCl, or BoringSSL to avoid "rolling your own."
• Spec construction generates detailed implementation specs, ambiguity logs, and test plans based on peer-reviewed research.
• Staged implementation guides the transition from plan to code, ensuring tests are written against the spec's edge cases.
• Security review performs a structured reading of the implementation to identify logic errors and deviations from the target standard.

How it works

1. Initialize the project using crypto-init to create the local workbench directory and define the target algorithm or paper.
2. Ingest the source material via crypto-intake and crypto-paper-review to extract parameters and threat models.
3. Map and Plan by running crypto-library-map and crypto-plan-review to select tools and approve the architecture.
4. Execute the build through crypto-implement and crypto-security-review to produce the final, reviewed code.

Frameworks & tools

This skill requires Python 3 with PyYAML and pypdf. It references a local registry of algorithms and math families to ensure standard compliance.

Why this beats prompting it yourself

Generic prompts often ignore the subtle edge cases in academic papers or suggest unsafe hand-rolled crypto. This skill enforces a mandatory review gate between specification and coding, preventing the LLM from making silent assumptions about encodings or security parameters.

Use cases

• Paper implementation translating a new research paper into a verified Python or C prototype.
• Standard compliance auditing an existing codebase against a specific RFC or NIST standard.
• Library migration planning the move from legacy primitives to modern, library-backed implementations.

Known limitations

The security review is a static reading of code and does not replace formal verification or a professional audit. Online access for fetching papers requires explicit per-request user consent.