More blurb

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Frank Denis 2013-01-20 16:56:17 -08:00
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# libsodium - P(ortable|ackageable) NaCl
# libsodium
Portable, cross-compilable, installable, packageable version of the NaCl
crypto library.
[NaCl](http://nacl.cr.yp.to/) (pronounced "salt") is a new easy-to-use
high-speed software library for network communication, encryption,
decryption, signatures, etc.
## comparison with vanilla NaCl
NaCl's goal is to provide all of the core operations needed to build
higher-level cryptographic tools.
Sodium is a portable, cross-compilable, installable, packageable
version of NaCl, binary-compatible with NaCl.
## Portable
In order to pick the fastest working implementation of each primitive,
NaCl performs tests and benchmarks at compile-time. Unfortunately, the
resulting library is not garanteed to work on different hardware.
Sodium currently only ships portable reference implementations.
Optimized implementations (including NEON optimizations) will eventually
be supported, but tests and benchmarks will be performed at run-time,
so that the same binary package can still run everywhere.
Sodium is tested on a variety of compilers and operating systems,
including Windows, iOS and Android.
## Installable
Sodium is a shared library with a machine-independant set of
headers, so that it can easily be used by 3rd party projects.
The library is built using autotools, making it easy to package.
Installation is trivial, and both compilation and testing can take
advantage of multiple CPU cores:
./configure
make
make check
make install
## Comparison with vanilla NaCl
The default public-key signature system in NaCl was a prototype that
shouldn't be used any more.
Sodium ships with the SUPERCOP reference implementation of
[Ed25519](http://ed25519.cr.yp.to/), and uses this system by default
for `crypto_sign*` operations.
For backward compatibility, the previous system is still compiled in,
as `crypto_sign_edwards25519sha512batch*`.
## Additional features
The Sodium library provides some convenience functions in order to retrieve
the current version of the library:
const char *sodium_version_string(void);
const int sodium_version_major(void);
const int sodium_version_minor(void);
Headers are installed in `${prefix}/include/sodium`.
A convenience header includes everything you need to use the library:
#include <sodium.h>
We are using ed25519 from SUPERCOP, as even DJB doesn't recommend using edwards25519sha512batch anymore - this will reach NaCL one day...