About:
Nettle is a cryptographic library that is designed to fit easily in more or less any context: in crypto toolkits for object-oriented languages (C++, Python, Pike, etc.), in applications like LSH or GNUPG, or even in kernel space. In most contexts, you need more than the basic cryptographic algorithms; you also need some way to keep track of available algorithms and their properties and variants. You often have some algorithm selection process, often dictated by a protocol you want to implement. And as the requirements of applications differ in subtle and not so subtle ways, an API that fits one application well can be a pain to use in a different context, which is why there are so many different cryptographic libraries around. Nettle tries to avoid this problem by doing one thing, the low-level crypto stuff, and providing a simple but general interface to it. In particular, Nettle doesn't do algorithm selection. It doesn't do memory allocation. It doesn't do any I/O. The idea is that one can build several application- and context-specific interfaces on top of Nettle and share the code, testcases, benchmarks, documentation, etc.

Author:
Niels Möller [contact developer]

Rating:	reset 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
8.40/10.00 (1 vote)

Homepage:
http://www.lysator.liu.se/~nisse/nettle
Tar/GZ:
ftp://ftp.lysator.liu.se/pub/security/lsh/nettle-1.12.tar.gz
CVS tree (cvsweb):
http://cvs.lysator.liu.se/[..]/viewcvs.cgi/lsh/src/nettle/?cvsroot=lsh
Mailing list archive:
http://lists.lysator.liu.se/pipermail/nettle-bugs/

Trove categories: [change]

[Development Status]		5 - Production/Stable
[Intended Audience]		Developers
[License]		OSI Approved :: GNU General Public License (GPL)
[Operating System]		OS Independent
[Programming Language]		C
[Topic]		Security :: Cryptography, Software Development :: Libraries

Dependencies: [change]
No dependencies filed

 Branches

Branch	Version	Last release	License	URLs
Default	1.12	05-Nov-2004	GNU General Public License (GPL)