The Security Impact of a New Cryptographic Library

This paper introduces a new cryptographic library, NaCl, and explains how the design and implementation of the library avoid various types of cryptographic disasters suffered by previous cryptographic libraries such as OpenSSL. For most cryptographic operations there exist widely accepted standards, such as the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) for secret-key encryption and 2048- bit RSA for public-key encryption. These primitives have been extensively studied, and breaking them is considered computationally infeasible on any existing computer cluster.