Latest updated 2001-09-25

Occasionally, I get questions from people who want to contibute to
crypto-related GNU projects.

There are several projects that you might want to look into.

LSH is the one I'm involved in. It's an GPL:ed implementation of the
secure shell protocols. Latest versions are at
ftp://ftp.lysator.liu.se/pub/security/lsh/. The README file (and the
rest of my current CVS repository) is at
http://www.lysator.liu.se/~nisse/lsh. Home page and mailing list
information is at http://www.net.lut.ac.uk/psst.

Then there is GNU Privacy Guard, a GPL:ed implementation of OpenPGP,
written by Werner Koch. See http://www.gnupg.org.

There is FreeS/WAN, the implementation of ipsec for Linux.

There's gnutls, under development by Nikos Mavroyanopoulos. Nikos also
have some other crypto-related projects, including a encryption
utility "mcrypt". See http://members.hellug.gr/nmav/

As for libraries, the somewhat unfortunate situation is that everybody
is hacking his own library. Werner has packaged the crypto parts of
gnupg into a library "gcrypt". Nikos has a written libraries mhash and
mcrypt. I have a library called "nettle". They all have somewhat
different goals. The design goals for Nettle is to be a low-level
library, that does a single thing well, and make as few assumptions on
its users as possible. I naturally urge everyone to use nettle, or at
least give it a serious consideration, and tell me if and how it fits
their context. See http://www.lysator.liu.se/~nisse/nettle

I'm sure there are other projects as well. You probably want to join
the corresponding mailing lists, and get and compile some or all of
the above and generally look around. When you find something that you
want to work on, speak with the appropriate maintainer to coordinate.

For LSH, the TODO and TASKLIST files can give you some ideas about
what is needed, although they are a little out of date. 

/Niels Möller