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Nettle

Nettle is a cryptographic library designed to fit any context: in crypto toolkits for object-oriented languages, in applications like LSH or GNUPG, or even in kernel space. Users need to keep track of available algorithms and their properties and variants. The algorithm selection process is dictated by the protocol you want to implement. Also, requirements of applications differ, so an API that fits one application well may be useless for another (which is why so many different cryptographic libraries exist).

Nettle avoids this problem by doing one thing, the low-level crypto stuff, and providing a simple but general interface to it. In particular, it doesn't do algorithm selection, memory allocation, or any I/O. However, users can build application- and context-specific interfaces on top of Nettle and share code, testcases, benchmarks, documentation, etc.

Last updated 26 Oct, 2004