New crypto API for browsers

Finally, a concerted effort to create a standard crypto API for browsers! A new W3C working group has been established to select a set of commonly used crypto operations and make them accessible through a standard API, so that JavaScript apps running the browser can perform SHA, key management, encryption and decryption without the need of custom libraries and at native speeds too.

The W3C crypto working group page is at http://www.w3.org/2012/webcrypto/.

Once completed and implemented by browsers, this new API will allow things like JSON Web Token (JWT) verification and decryption to be done with much less effort, both in terms of programming and CPU power. At present, if you want to run algorithms in your JavaScript app you will need custom libraries which are generally slower than native libraries.