Security improvement: Replace stablelib with audited noble libraries

[paulmillr]

noble cryptography (https://paulmillr.com/noble/) is a high-security, auditable set of contained cryptographic libraries with following features:

• No dependencies, protection against supply chain attacks
• Auditable TypeScript / JS code
• Supported on all major platforms
• Releases are signed with PGP keys and built transparently with NPM provenance

Furthermore, noble-hashes were created with a grant by Ethereum Foundation. hashes and curves have been independently audited by 3rd party entity.

You have following deps:

walletconnect-monorepo/packages/utils/package.json

Lines 33 to 38 in 4ee518c

	"dependencies": {
	"@stablelib/chacha20poly1305": "1.0.1",
	"@stablelib/hkdf": "1.0.1",
	"@stablelib/random": "^1.0.2",
	"@stablelib/sha256": "1.0.1",
	"@stablelib/x25519": "^1.0.3",

They can be replaced with:

"@noble/ciphers": "0.1.3",
"@noble/curves": "1.1.0",
"@noble/hashes": "1.3.1",

The usage is as following:

import { chacha20poly1305 } from "@noble/ciphers/chacha";
import { hkdf } from "@noble/hashes/hkdf";
import { sha256 } from "@noble/hashes/sha256";
import { x25519 } from "@noble/curves/ed25519";
import { randomBytes as random } from "@noble/hashes/utils";

[paulmillr]

I assume this repo is unmaintained and you don't really care, since there was no response for 2.5 months (#2272)

@pedrouid @ganchoradkov @0xasimetriq @bkrem

[hazae41]

Sad to see no response to this

I will build a custom WalletConnect lib, it will include adapters for Noble, WebAssembly and Stablelib so you will be able to choose which one you prefer (and you will be able to do it at runtime, e.g. depending on the user connection speed, tradeoff performances against bundle size)

By the way, it will also support arbitrary transport protocols like WebSocket-over-Tor instead of only native WebSockets

EDIT: this might explain why this issue is ignored

[pedrouid]

Hi @paulmillr @hazae41, can you guys chill out?

I have no connection to StableLib whatsoever 😅 so no need to start conspiracies just because I have one-line commit correcting a typo inside a comment: StableLib/stablelib@cad7e89

Now it's important to note that my time in the last 18 months has not been spent coding or reviewing PRs so you are trying to reach out to the wrong guy

Also I follow both of you on Twitter and my DMs are open plus I've followed @paulmillr work since you started writing the Noble cryptography library

So I'm not committing to switch cryptography libraries in this thread but I promise you that I will ask the Javascript team to investigate the pros and cons

Give us some time to evaluate this and we can connect to discuss

Finally we take security very seriously but this comment above is not the right away to approach it and it just makes your argument weaker

[hazae41]

Hey Pedro,

Sorry my brother if I sounded attackful, you guys are doing great work, and I think we all understand you don't have many time to improve everything

We both take security very seriously, and this is sad to see no response to such improvement proposal; in fact, we would have understood a response that doesn't fit our vision, even a "No, we don't have time" would have been great for us

Keep up the good work ☀️

[paulmillr]

Exactly — the issue is response time, which is 5 months at this point. The same reason makes angry security researchers drop 0days in public, without responsible disclosure.

[paulmillr]

@pedrouid

So I'm not committing to switch cryptography libraries in this thread but I promise you that I will ask the Javascript team to investigate the pros and cons

Give us some time to evaluate this and we can connect to discuss

When can we expect a response from the team?

[paulmillr]

@pedrouid ?

[glitch-txs]

@paulmillr what's wrong with the current configuration? I'm aware noble is audited and well trusted.

[hazae41]

incompetence or malice? who knows? ☹️

[hazae41]

there is some point where incompetence becomes malice when you blatantly ignore things

you guys should be ashamed of yourselves for not fixing such stuff on purpose and making the whole industry insecure

[arein]

@talentlessguy thanks for raising this. When this library was audited by trail of bits this didn’t come up. We’ll ask some auditors and folks in the security community to inform what the right thing to do is and we’ll revert back here then 👍

[glitch-txs]

@talentlessguy we are more than happy to merge a PR on this. Otherwise we will look to address it in the near future. Thanks! 🙏🏻

[paulmillr]

When this library was audited by trail of bits this didn’t come up

Because walletconnect did not ask trail of bits to audit dependencies.

The audit pdf is clear (page 9):

we did not perform a dedicated code review of the dependencies themselves

[paulmillr]

Submitted a pull request: #5241

[paulmillr]

And second one WalletConnect/walletconnect-utils#185

[glitch-txs]

Thank you 🙌🏻