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EBlob format ¶

EBlob is an encrypted blob (binary large object, in the terms of databases), holding any kind of symmetrically encrypted data with the passphrase used to derive the key. It is used to secure configuration files, holding valuable private keys, allowing them to be transferred safely everywhere.

In fact it uses two factors for securing the data:

• salt, that is kept inside eblob, something you have
• passphrase, that is kept inside the head, something you know

Whole security depends on the passphrase itself. Pay attention that this is not the password. Password is a short string of high entropy (highly random) characters, but passphrase is (very) long string of low-entropy characters. Low-entropy text is much more easier to remember, and its length provides pretty enough entropy as a result.

Password strengthening function is applied to that passphrase to mitigate brute-force and dictionary attacks on it. Here, Balloon memory-hard password hashing function is used, together with BLAKE2b-256 hash. It has proven memory-hardness properties, very easy to implement, resistant to cache attacks and seems more secure than Argon2 (Password Hashing Competition winner).

EBlob is an XDR-encoded structure:

+-------+------------------+------+
| MAGIC | S | T | P | SALT | BLOB |
+-------+------------------+------+

	XDR type	Value
Magic number	8-byte, fixed length opaque data	N N C P B 0x00 0x00 0x03
S, T, P	unsigned integer	Space cost, time cost and parallel jobs number
Salt	32 bytes, fixed length opaque data	Randomly generated salt
Blob	variable length opaque data	Authenticated and Encrypted data itself

1. generate the key using balloon(BLAKE2b-256, S, T, P, salt, password)
2. encrypt and authenticate blob using ChaCha20-Poly1305. EBlob packet itself, with empty blob field, is fed as an additional authenticated data

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