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NaCl (software)

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Not to be confused with Google Native Client.
This article is about the cryptography library. For the configuration management software, see Salt (software).
NaCl
Original author(s)Daniel J. Bernstein, Tanja Lange, Peter Schwabe
Initial release2008; 16 years ago (2008)
Stable release
20110221 / February 21, 2011; 13 years ago (2011-02-21)
Operating systemUNIX-like
Licensepublic domain[1]
Websitenacl.cr.yp.to

NaCl (pronounced "salt") is an abbreviation for "Networking and Cryptography library", a public domain "...high-speed software library for network communication, encryption, decryption, signatures, etc".[2]

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[3] and Peter Schwabe.[4] The main goal while creating NaCl, according to the paper, was to "avoid various types of cryptographic disasters suffered by previous cryptographic libraries".[1]

Basic functions

Public-key cryptography

Secret-key cryptography

Low-level functions

  • String comparison.[7]

Implementations

Reference implementation is written in C, often with several inline assembler. C++ and Python are handled as wrappers.[8]

NaCl has a variety of programming language bindings such as PHP,[9] and forms the basis for Libsodium, a cross-platform cryptography library created in 2013 which is API compatible with NaCl.

Alternative implementations

  • Libsodium — a portable, cross-compilable, installable, packageable, API-compatible version of NaCl.[10]
  • NaCl Pharo - a Pharo Smalltalk Extension[11].
  • TweetNaCl — a tiny C library, which fits in just 100 tweets (140 symbols each), but supports all NaCl functions.[12]
  • NaCl for Tcl — a port to the Tcl language.[13][third-party source needed]
  • NaCl for JavaScript — a port of TweetNaCl/NaCl cryptographic library to the JavaScript language.[14]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b https://cr.yp.to/highspeed/coolnacl-20120725.pdf "The security impact of a new cryptographic library" Daniel J. Bernstein, Tanja Lange, Peter Schwabe
  2. ^ "NaCl: Networking and Cryptography library".
  3. ^ "Tanja Lange's Homepage".
  4. ^ "Peter Schwabe's Homepage".
  5. ^ "Hashing". 2010-08-30. Retrieved 2015-11-14.
  6. ^ . 2017-12-13 https://download.libsodium.org/doc/hashing/generic_hashing.html#algorithm-details. Retrieved 2018-05-19. {{cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  7. ^ Bernstein, Daniel J. (10 March 2009). Cryptography in NaCl (PDF).
  8. ^ "NaCl Internals".
  9. ^ "NaCl PHP Extension". Github.
  10. ^ "Libsodium".
  11. ^ "SmalltalkHub repository". {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |dead-url= (help)
  12. ^ "TweetNaCl".
  13. ^ "Tclers Wiki - NaCl for Tcl".
  14. ^ "TweetNaCl".
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