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ANNOUNCE: Nettle-1.0 - a low level cryptographic library
From: |
Niels Möller |
Subject: |
ANNOUNCE: Nettle-1.0 - a low level cryptographic library |
Date: |
04 Oct 2001 16:14:19 +0200 |
What is Nettle? A quote from the introduction in the Nettle Manual:
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, ...), 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, 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. And that 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 @emph{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. For this first version, the only application using
Nettle is LSH, and it uses an object-oriented abstraction on top of the
library.
Build nettle with the usual ./configure && make && make check && make
install. Read the manual. Mail me if you have any questions or
suggestions.
More information, including an online manual, is available at
http://www.lysator.liu.se/~nisse/nettle.
The source code can be downloaded from
http://www.lysator.liu.se/~nisse/archive/nettle-1.0.tar.gz
ftp://ftp.lysator.liu.se/pub/security/lsh/nettle-1.0.tar.gz
I naturally urge everyone writing free crypto software to use nettle,
or at least give it a serious consideration, and tell me if and how it
fits their context.
Happy hacking,
/Niels Möller <address@hidden>
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