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Node RSA is broken with React Native #9427
Description
https://github.com/rzcoder/node-rsa is broken in React Native for some reason:
This is also reported here:
This ticket is mentioned but I do not think it is exactly the same.
Activity
SamSaffron commentedon Aug 16, 2016
Some further analysis shows that the root of the issue is that react native does not ship with the native nodejs crypto module.
ryankask commentedon Aug 16, 2016
react-native doesn't use node to run apps so you can't access any node modules. You can read about the JS environment here: https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/javascript-environment.html.
Check out js.coach for some of the available crypto packages available on npm.
Please let me know if there's any other way I can help.
ryankask commentedon Aug 16, 2016
@facebook-github-bot answered
SamSaffron commentedon Aug 16, 2016
@ryankask I still feel react native could be doing a bit better here...
long term backfilling some of the modules also makes sense, crypto could be implemented in pure js, for example
btw @facebook-github-bot-2 http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/06/welcome-stack-overflow-valued-associate-00008/ I know its a robot ... still :)
ryankask commentedon Aug 16, 2016
I knew the bot's response would be awkward 😄
Better error messages are always good. I've seen this happen a few times so the JS environment doc could make it clear that your app isn't running node and the node packages aren't available.
I think if anything the W3C's Web Cryptography API could be implemented although I'm not sure if anyone would maintain that.
SamSaffron commentedon Aug 16, 2016
@ryankask no worries at all :)
Web Crypto API would be fantastic addition. Though perhaps there are some smaller steps that can be taken first.
I think the big problem at the moment in the RSA department is that too many people are now leaning on "pure JS" implementations and the trouble is you can not properly get random numbers from pure JS cause you can't get entropy and need to lean native implementations for that.
Perhaps a smaller addition that could at least pave the way for proper crypto would be simply implementing https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/RandomSource/getRandomValues (which would be a tiny subset of the crypto api, but "unlock" the ability to do RSA key generation properly.)
ide commentedon Aug 16, 2016
React Native is a third JS environment. Similar to how you don't expect document.createElement to work in Node or require('http') to work in Chrome, expect modules that haven't been written with React Native not to always work.
Implementing async crypto primitives is maybe a good idea and someone should try it and publish their package to npm if it works well.