NaCl (software)

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

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 team's 2011 paper, was to "avoid various types of cryptographic disasters suffered by previous cryptographic libraries". The team does so by safer designs that avoid 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.