NaCl (pronounced "salt") is a new easy-to-use high-speed software library for network communication, encryption, decryption, signatures, etc. NaCl's goal is to provide all of the core operations needed to build higher-level cryptographic tools.

Of course, other libraries already exist for these core operations. NaCl advances the state of the art by improving security, by improving usability, and by improving speed.

The core NaCl development team consists of Daniel J. Bernstein (University of Illinois at Chicago), Tanja Lange (Technische Universiteit Eindhoven), and Peter Schwabe (Academia Sinica).