The Seedling Sees the Light of Day

November 26, 2018

The Sequoia team proudly presents the first release of a new, cool OpenPGP implementation.

On October 16, 2017, we made the first commit to the Sequoia repository. Just over a year and a thousand commits later, Sequoia’s low-level API is nearly feature complete, and is already usable. For instance, a port of the p≡p engine to Sequoia is almost finished, and the code is significantly simpler than the version using the current OpenPGP library. We’ve also made experimental ports of other software that use OpenPGP, and written some new software to further validate the completeness and ergonomics of the API.

During a successful talk at RustFest Rome presenting Sequoia, and the challenges of implementing Sequoia in Rust, we officially released version 0.1 of Sequoia.

About Sequoia: Sequoia is developed by three former GnuPG developers, Neal H. Walfield, Justus Winter, and Kai Michaelis. To mitigate many common security problems, Sequoia is written in Rust, a strongly typed language, which provides temporal and spatial memory safety. Rust also provides excellent support for embedding libraries in other languages. Sequoia already provides C bindings, and Python bindings are being actively developed.

Sequoia development is primarily funded by the p≡p Foundation with additional support from the Wau Holland Foundation. Contributions are welcome. Financial contributions can be made via the p≡p Foundation. People interested in making technical contributions are welcome to reach out on IRC, or the mailing list.

Additional information about Sequoia can be found on our website, and in a recent presentation introducing Sequoia: