Libgcrypt
Cryptographic software library
Libgcrypt is a cryptography library developed as a separated module of GnuPG. It can also be used independently of GnuPG, but depends on its error-reporting library Libgpg-error.
It provides functions for all fundamental cryptographic building blocks:
Libgcrypt features its own multiple precision arithmetic implementation, with assembler implementations for a variety of processors, including Alpha, AMD64, HP PA-RISC, i386, i586, M68K, MIPS 3, PowerPC, and SPARC. It also features an entropy gathering utility, coming in different versions for Unix-like and Windows machines.
Usually multiple, stable branches of Libgcrypt are maintained in parallel; as of May 2026 this is the Libgrypt 1.12 branch as LTS ("long-term support") branch, the 1.11 branch as previous stable branch, which will be maintained at least until 2028-06-30 , and the 1.8 branch as "old-LTS" branch, which is still maintained as long a customer with an "extended Long Term Support contract" exists, despite its original end-of-life date being 2024-12-31.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Libgcrypt”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
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