# Botan

# Welcome

Botan is a BSD-licensed crypto library for C++. It provides applications with most any cryptographic algorithm you might be looking for, along with SSL/TLS, X.509 certificates and CRLs, a pipeline-style message processing system, and a wide variety of other features. A third party open source implementation of SSHv2 that uses botan is also available. In addition to C++ you can use botan from Python or Perl, though the current bindings only wrap portions of the library.

See the Frequently Asked Questions for a list of common questions and answers.

The core of botan is written in C++98 with no dependencies besides the STL and the rest of the ISO standard library, but the library also includes optional modules which make further assumptions about their environment, providing features such as compression (using zlib or bzip2), entropy gathering, and secure memory allocation. Assembly implementations of key algorithms like SHA-1 and multiple precision integer routines for x86 and x86-64 processors are also included.

It runs on most common operating systems and can be used with a number of different commercial and open source compilers. The build log contains information about recently tested targets. It is already included in most major package distributions, including Fedora, EPEL (for RHEL/CentOS), Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Arch Linux, Slackbuild, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Cygwin, MacPorts, OpenPKG, and T2 SDE and has more than a few known users.

It was started as a personal project by Jack Lloyd,who continues to be the maintainer and release manager. Since the first release in 2001, a number of individuals and organizations have contributed bug fixes and new features. Check out the release notes and news archive for more project history.

If you need help or have questions, send a mail to the development mailing list. “Philosophical” bug reports, announcements of programs using the library, and related topics are also welcome. Commercial support options are also available. If you find what you believe to be a bug, please file a ticket in Bugzilla.

A useful reference while reading this manual is the Doxygen documentation.