arc archives are tar archives compressed with gzip and then encrypted with the XChaCha20 + Poly1305 authenticated encryption mode using a key derived in one of three ways:
- from a password using the Argon2 KDF
- from a static-ephemeral ECDH key exchange
- from a random key split into n shards
The on-disk format begins with a 1-byte disk format version V followed by a 1-byte archive type T, then a type-specific number of bytes, a 16-byte Poly1305 authentication tag, a 24-byte cryptographically secure random nonce, and finally the encrypted data.
All numbers are stored in little-endian format.
The 32-byte XChaCha20Poly1305 key is generated by applying the Argon2 KDF to a user-supplied password and 32 bytes of cryptographically secure random salt.
T = 1
I = uint32 number of iterations
M = uint32 memory usage
┌─┬─┬────┬────┬───────────────────────────────┐
│V│T│I │M │Salt │
├─┴─┴────┴────┴─┬───────────────────────┬─────┴─────────────┐
│Tag │Nonce │Data···············│
├───────────────┴───────────────────────┴───────────────────┤
│···························································│
└───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
The 32-byte XChaCha20Poly1305 key results from applying BLAKE2b to the shared secret derived from a X448 ECDH key exchange with an ephemeral private key and static public key. The corresponding ephemeral public key is embedded in the archive.
T = 2
┌─┬─┬───────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│V│T│Ephemeral Public Key │
├─┴─┴───────────┬───────────────────────┬───────────────────┤
│Tag │Nonce │Data···············│
├───────────────┴───────────────────────┴───────────────────┤
│···························································│
└───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
The 32-byte XChaCha20Poly1305 key is cryptographically secure random bytes split into n shards using Shamir's Secret Sharing algorithm. One archive is generated for each n and k archives must be present to recreate the key and decrypt the archive.
T = 3
n = shard number
┌─┬─┬─┬───────────────────────────────┐
│V│T│n│Shard │
├─┴─┴─┴─────────┬─────────────────────┴─┬───────────────────┐
│Tag │Nonce │Data···············│
├───────────────┴───────────────────────┴───────────────────┤
│···························································│
└───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
arc curve448 public and private keys are encrypted with XChaCha20+ Poly1305 using a key derived from applying the Argon2 KDF to a password and 32 bytes of cryptographically secure random salt.
T = public = 1, private = 2
I = uint32 number of iterations
M = uint32 memory usage
┌─┬─┬────┬────┬───────────────────────────────┐
│V│T│I │M │Salt │
├─┴─┴────┴────┴─┬───────────────────────┬─────┴─────────────┐
│Tag │Nonce │Key················│
├───────────────┴───────────────────────┴───────────────────┤
│···························································│
└───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
Private keys use a user-supplied password while public keys use an empty string.