Vitamin C

Vitamin C is like vitamins for your Rust code, especially code dealing with cryptography and managing sensitive data. It is actually a suite of crates that you can use individually or via this top-level crate via features.

Vitamin C is in active development and aims to address the following:

• Misuse Resistance: it aims to make it difficult to write code that is insecure.

• Verified: be verified using formal methods and testing and selects dependencies that are verified.

• Vetted: be vetted by security experts and selects dependencies that are vetted.

• Minimal: be minimal and only include what is necessary.

• Consistent: have a consistent interface with everything in one place.

• Compatible: support native and WebAssembly applications, with embedded (no_std) support as a future goal. All crates currently require std.

• Fast: speed and security can be friends!

Which crate should I use?

I want to…	Start with
Encrypt and decrypt Rust values with AES-256-GCM	vitaminc-encrypt
Keep sensitive values out of debug output and wipe them on drop	vitaminc-protected
Generate cryptographic randomness	vitaminc-random
Describe structured values or implement an encryption backend	vitaminc-aead, with vitaminc-context for associated data
Derive pseudorandom values or equality-index terms	vitaminc-prf for the interfaces, vitaminc-hmac for HMAC-SHA256, and vitaminc-normalize for equality encodings
Integrate an order-revealing encryption scheme	vitaminc-ore for terms and scheme interfaces; supply an ORE backend
Implement a hash/MAC adapter, including a remote provider	vitaminc-traits and vitaminc-async-traits; vitaminc-kms supplies AWS KMS HMAC
Exchange encoded values across a language boundary, or store versioned blobs	vitaminc-aead-frame; read its storage contract before persisting data
Build a native Node.js addon	vitaminc-aead-napi; this is a Rust library for addons, not an npm package

The facade's features expose most of these crates. vitaminc-aead-frame and vitaminc-aead-napi are direct dependencies. Indexes reveal information about values; read the normalization and ORE guides before choosing an index.

Usage

You can install the top-level vitaminc crate and enable specific features:

cargo add vitaminc --features protected,random

Or, if you only need a specific capability, you can install a crate directly:

cargo add vitaminc-protected

With the protected feature enabled, keep a value in a Protected wrapper to redact its debug output and wipe its contents when it is dropped:

use vitaminc::protected::{Controlled, Protected};

let mut token = Protected::new(String::from("example-token"));
token.update(|value| value.push_str("-updated"));

let debug = format!("{token:?}");
assert!(debug.contains("***"));
assert!(!debug.contains("example-token"));

Compatibility

The minimum supported Rust version (MSRV) is 1.88.0, except for vitaminc-kms, which requires 1.94.1. Enabling the facade's aws-kms feature raises its requirement to 1.94.1 too.

MSRV increases require a minor release (for example, 0.8 to 0.9) and must be called out in release notes. Patch releases retain the existing floor.

All crates require std; there is no no_std configuration yet. Supported targets include native builds, vitaminc-encrypt on wasm32-unknown-unknown, and the separate encryption guest on wasm32-wasip1. JavaScript WASM hosts need Web Crypto and the generated bindings described in the encryption setup guide. The KMS adapter and Node addon bindings target native applications.

License: MIT. vitaminc-ore also includes Unicode-licensed data and declares MIT AND Unicode-3.0; see its license files.

Features and sub-crates

The facade enables no features by default. Each feature exposes the named crate. Some also enable supporting facade features:

Feature	Also enables
context, permutation	protected
prf	context
hmac	prf
async-traits, aws-kms	traits
aead	context
encrypt	traits, aead
normalize	aead; also PRF normalization if prf is enabled
ore	normalize

These dependencies apply transitively. normalize alone does not enable prf. For options such as hlist, chrono, or bitvec, add the relevant crate directly and enable its feature; the facade does not forward them.

Feature	Source	Crates.io	Documentation
aead	vitaminc-aead
Direct dependency	vitaminc-aead-frame
Direct dependency	vitaminc-aead-napi
async-traits	vitaminc-async-traits
context	vitaminc-context
encrypt	vitaminc-encrypt
hmac	vitaminc-hmac
normalize	vitaminc-normalize
ore	vitaminc-ore
aws-kms	vitaminc-kms
—¹	vitaminc-password
permutation	vitaminc-permutation
prf	vitaminc-prf
protected	vitaminc-protected
random	vitaminc-random
traits	vitaminc-traits

¹ vitaminc-password is not currently exposed as a vitaminc facade feature — depend on the crate directly.