Nettle is a cryptographic library designed to fit easily in a wide range of toolkits and applications.

It began as a collection of low-level cryptography functions from lsh in 2001.

Nettle is an attempt to avoid this problem by doing one thing (the low-level cryptography) and providing a simple and general interface to it.

Thus Nettle is intended to provide a core cryptography library upon which numerous application and context specific interfaces can be built.

A few individual files are licensed under more permissive licences or in the public domain.