25 lines
1.3 KiB
Plaintext
25 lines
1.3 KiB
Plaintext
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Nettle is a cryptographic library that is designed to fit easily in more
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or less any context: In crypto toolkits for object-oriented languages
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(C++, Python, Pike, ...), in applications like LSH or GNUPG, or even in
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kernel space. In most contexts, you need more than the basic
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cryptographic algorithms, you also need some way to keep track of
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available algorithms, their properties and variants. You often have some
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algorithm selection process, often dictated by a protocol you want to
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implement.
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And as the requirements of applications differ in subtle and not so
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subtle ways, an API that fits one application well can be a pain to use
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in a different context. And that is why there are so many different
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cryptographic libraries around.
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Nettle tries to avoid this problem by doing one thing, the low-level
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crypto stuff, and providing a simple but general interface to it.
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In particular, Nettle doesn't do algorithm selection. It doesn't do
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memory allocation. It doesn't do any I/O.
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The idea is that one can build several application and context specific
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interfaces on top of Nettle, and share the code, test cases, benchmarks,
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documentation, etc. Examples are the Nettle module for the Pike
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language, and LSH, which both use an object-oriented abstraction on top
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of the library.
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