Webcrypto Runtime in NodeJS

[ChadKillingsworth]

This is a followup to 466

Signing and verification are now natively async in Node (yay!). However encryption and decryption are still not - except when using the new webcrypto object. Is it possible to expose the webcrypto runtime to NodeJS or to allow webcrypto methods to be used for encryption / decryption operations in NodeJS?

I have a high load service and I can't block the main event loop with crypto operations. I'm currently using worker-threads to offload the operations, but it adds a lot of unnecessary complexity.

I'm open to other suggestions as well.

[panva]

You can use the jose-browser-runtime npm release in your Node.js project given you only target Node.js versions with the globals exposed.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/jose-browser-runtime

[panva]

I can now see it's missing an export for Node.js to recognize, will fix that soon.

[panva]

https://github.com/panva/jose/releases/tag/v4.15.2 fixes the missing node entrypoint

[ChadKillingsworth]

Fantastic! Thanks for adding that. One note: I didn't even know that the jose-browser-rutime project existed. I might suggest adding a note to the jose readme about this option.

[panva]

It's the last resort, not intended for general but rather niche uses.

[ChadKillingsworth]

Verifying that this option worked as advertised. One note: in Node 18 the globalThis object is missing the crypto and CryptoKey objects. I had to define those before the library is imported. I verified that they are present in Node 20 (but I'm not ready to use Node 20 in prod yet).

[panva]

You can use the --experimental-global-webcrypto node cli flag in v18.x

https://nodejs.org/docs/latest-v18.x/api/cli.html#--experimental-global-webcrypto

[zionnite]

please how do i add --experimental-global-webcrypto
thanks