NaCl (software)


NaCl is an abbreviation for "Networking and Cryptography library", a public domain "...high-speed software library for network communication, encryption, decryption, signatures, etc".
NaCl was created by the mathematician and programmer Daniel J. Bernstein who is best known for the creation of qmail and Curve25519. The core team also includes Tanja Lange and Peter Schwabe. The main goal while creating NaCl, according to the paper, was to "avoid various types of cryptographic disasters suffered by previous cryptographic libraries".

Basic functions

Public-key cryptography

Reference implementation is written in C, often with several inline assembler. C++ and Python are handled as wrappers.
NaCl has a variety of programming language bindings such as PHP, and forms the basis for Libsodium, a cross-platform cryptography library created in 2013 which is API compatible with NaCl.

Alternative implementations