I’ve said time and time again: don’t write your own encryption algorithm. Once you’ve chosen an existing algorithm, don’t write your own implementation.
Today I had to look at an encryption library that had been developed to store some files in an app. The library used a custom implementation of SHA256-HMAC, and a custom implementation of CBC mode. The implementations certainly looked OK, and seemed to match the descriptions in the textbooks. They also seem to work – you can encrypt a file to get gibberish, and decrypt the gibberish to get the file back.
So the first thing I did was to crack open Xcode and replace these custom functions with CommonCrypto. CommonCrypto’s internals also look a lot like the textbook descriptions of the methods, too. So it would be surprising if these two approaches yielded different results.
These two approaches yielded different results. This was surprising. Specifically, I found that the CBC implementation would sometimes use junk memory, which the CommonCrypto version never does. Of course, the way in which this junk was used was predictable enough that the encryption routine was still reversible – but could it be that the custom implementation was leaking information about the plaintext in the cipher-text by inappropriate re-use of the buffer? Possibly, and that’s good enough for me to throw the custom implementation out. Proving whether or not this implementation is “safe” is something that a specialist cryptographer could probably do in half a day. However, as I was able to use half a day to produce something I had more confidence in, just by using a tested implementation, I decided there was no need to do that work.
Or if you *must* write your own implementation (happens sometimes, often thanks to licensing problems), at least have the sense to check against a reference implementation and/or some well-known test vectors.