NaCl (software)

NaCl (pronounced "salt") is an abbreviation for Networking and Cryptography Library, a public domain, high-speed software library for cryptography.

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 (2008)
Stable release
20110221 / February 21, 2011 (2011-02-21)
Operating systemUNIX-like
Licensepublic domain
Websitenacl.cr.yp.to

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 teams 2011 paper, was to "avoid various types of cryptographic disasters suffered by previous cryptographic libraries". The teams does so by safer designs that avoids issues such as side-channel leakage and loss of randomness, by being performant enough that safety features do not get disabled by the user, and by picking better cryptographic primitives. The high-level "box" API is designed to encourage the use of authenticated encryption.

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