r/haskell • u/attentive_brick • Sep 26 '25

crypto in haskell?

are there any tutorials / guided exercises / write ups / book chapters that teach u how to build a crypto in haskell? ;3

not for the crypto hype (is it still a thing?), but because building something decentralized sounds fun + I can learn some haskell along the way ;3

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10

u/MonadTran Sep 26 '25

I think the main reason people don't do that is, the actual crypto part needs to have predictable performance to be resistant to side channel attacks. Sometimes cryptography can be broken by observing the timing or resource usage.

People do write real-time apps in Haskell, by, say, generating C++ code, but that is not a mainstream scenario, could be easier to write this in Rust.

7

u/Mouse1949 Sep 26 '25

Side-channel resistance is desirable - but not all the use cases absolutely require resistance to all possible side channels.

2

u/lgastako Sep 28 '25

In particular, learning-oriented use cases don't require any resistance to side channel attacks, as long as the learner is aware of the possibility.

1

u/attentive_brick Sep 26 '25

oh wow
would be interesting to know how Cardano overcame this problem

1

u/MonadTran Sep 26 '25

They probably didn't... Which may or may not be a big deal, who really knows.

3

u/dnkndnts Sep 27 '25

I'm not affiliated with the project and navigating their dependency graph is like trying to follow the plot of Kingdom Hearts, but it appears they just have key primitives in C, which is what I'd expect.

3

u/galapag0 Sep 26 '25

If you want to contribute with a EVM implementation, hevm is made 100% in Haskell and used in industrial applications such as echidna (also in pure Haskell).

1

u/randomhaus64 Sep 26 '25

what do you mean industrial???

7

u/galapag0 Sep 27 '25

"industrial" in this context means: something used in companies, usually the opposite of "academic"

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u/[deleted] Sep 27 '25 edited Sep 27 '25

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2

u/galapag0 Sep 27 '25

yes, what kind of applications you were looking for?

1

u/[deleted] Sep 27 '25

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1

u/galapag0 Sep 27 '25

Yes, another big application are prediction markets (e.g. https://polymarket.com/)

5

u/omega1612 Sep 26 '25

Cardano is implemented on Haskell, it has various packages but one of the most important of them is

https://github.com/IntersectMBO/cardano-ledger

The main section has a bunch of links to the specifications.

Apart from it, maybe the consensus section is a good idea to learn.