NaCl (software)
- Not to be confused with Google Native Client.
| Original author(s) | Daniel J. Bernstein, Tanja Lange, Peter Schwabe |
|---|---|
| Initial release | 2008 |
| Operating system | UNIX-like |
| License | public domain |
| Website |
nacl |
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".[1]
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[2] and Peter Schwabe.[3] The main goal while creating NaCl, according to the paper, was to "avoid various types of cryptographic disasters suffered by previous cryptographic libraries".[4]
Basic functions
Public-key cryptography
- Authenticated encryption using Curve25519, Salsa20, and Poly1305.
- Signatures using Ed25519.
- Key agreement using Curve25519.
Secret-key cryptography
- Authenticated encryption using Salsa20 and Poly1305.
- Encryption using Salsa20 or AES.
- Authentication using HMAC-SHA-512-256.
- One-time authentication using Poly1305.
Low-level functions
Key features
- No data flow from secrets to load addresses.
- No data flow from secrets to branch conditions.
- No padding oracles.
- Centralizing randomness.
- Avoiding unnecessary randomness.
- Extremely high speed.
Implementations
Reference implementation is written in C, often with several inline assembler. C++ and Python are handled as wrappers.[7]
NaCl has a variety of programming language bindings such as PHP,[8] and forms the basis for Libsodium, a cross-platform cryptography library created in 2013 which is API compatible with NaCl.
Alternative implementation
- Libsodium — a portable, cross-compilable, installable, packageable, API-compatible version of NaCl.[9]
- TweetNaCl — a tiny C library, which fits in just 100 tweets (140 symbols each), but supports all NaCl functions.[10]
- NaCl for Tcl — a port to the Tcl language.[11]
See also
References
- ↑ "NaCl: Networking and Cryptography library".
- ↑ "Tanja Lange's Homepage".
- ↑ "Peter Schwabe's Homepage".
- ↑ https://cr.yp.to/highspeed/coolnacl-20120725.pdf
- ↑ "Hashing". 2010-08-30. Retrieved 2015-11-14.
- ↑ Bernstein, Daniel J. (10 March 2009). Cryptography in NaCl (PDF).
- ↑ "NaCl Internals".
- ↑ "NaCl PHP Extension". Github.
- ↑ "Libsodium".
- ↑ "TweetNaCl".
- ↑ "Tclers Wiki - NaCl for Tcl".