1 What is Nettle? A quote from the introduction in the Nettle Manual:
3 Nettle is a cryptographic library that is designed to fit easily in more
4 or less any context: In crypto toolkits for object-oriented languages
5 (C++, Python, Pike, ...), in applications like LSH or GNUPG, or even in
6 kernel space. In most contexts, you need more than the basic
7 cryptographic algorithms, you also need some way to keep track of available
8 algorithms, their properties and variants. You often have some algorithm
9 selection process, often dictated by a protocol you want to implement.
11 And as the requirements of applications differ in subtle and not so
12 subtle ways, an API that fits one application well can be a pain to use
13 in a different context. And that is why there are so many different
14 cryptographic libraries around.
16 Nettle tries to avoid this problem by doing one thing, the low-level
17 crypto stuff, and providing a simple but general interface to it.
18 In particular, Nettle doesn't do algorithm selection. It doesn't do
19 memory allocation. It doesn't do any I/O.
21 The idea is that one can build several application and context specific
22 interfaces on top of Nettle, and share the code, test cases, benchmarks,
23 documentation, etc. Examples are the Nettle module for the Pike
24 language, and LSH, which both use an object-oriented abstraction on top
27 Nettle is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
28 the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free
29 Software Foundation. See the file COPYING for details. Most, but not
30 all, of Nettle can also be used under the terms of the GNU Lesser
31 General Public License; please read the Copyright section of the
32 manual if you want to exercise this option.
34 Build nettle with the usual ./configure && make && make check && make
35 install. Read the manual. Mail me if you have any questions or
38 You can also build Nettle from cvs, using
40 cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.lysator.liu.se:/cvsroot/lsh login
42 cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.lysator.liu.se:/cvsroot/lsh co nettle
44 If you get it from cvs, you need to build it with
46 ./.bootstrap && ./configure && make && make check
48 You may want to subscribe to the nettle-bugs mailing list. See
49 <URL: http://lists.lysator.liu.se/mailman/listinfo/nettle-bugs>.
53 /Niels Möller <nisse@lysator.liu.se>