Bouncy Castle (cryptography)

Bouncy Castle is a collection of APIs used in cryptography. It includes APIs for both the Java and the C# programming languages. The APIs are supported by a registered Australian charitable organization: Legion of the Bouncy Castle Inc. Bouncy Castle is Australian in origin and therefore American restrictions on the export of cryptography from the United States do not apply to it. Bouncy Castle started when two colleagues were tired of having to re-invent a set of cryptography libraries each time they changed jobs working in server-side Java SE. One of the developers was active in Java ME (J2ME at that time) development as a hobby and a design consideration was to include the greatest range of Java VMs for the library, including those on J2ME. This design consideration led to the architecture that exists in Bouncy Castle. The project, founded in May 2000, was originally written in Java only, but added a C# API in 2004. The original Java API consisted of approximately 27,000 lines of code, including test code and provided support for J2ME, a JCE/JCA provider, and basic X.509 certificate generation. In comparison, the 1.53 release consists of 390,640 lines of code, including test code. It supports the same functionality as the original release with a larger number of algorithms, plus PKCS#10, PKCS#12, CMS, S/MIME, OpenPGP, DTLS, TLS, OCSP, TSP, CMP, CRMF, DVCS, DANE, EST and Attribute Certificates. The C# API is around 145,000 lines of code and supports most of what the Java API does. Some key properties of the project are: Strong emphasis on standards compliance and adaptability. Public support facilities include an issue tracker, dev mailing list and a wiki all available at the website. Commercial support provided under resources for the relevant API listed on the Bouncy Castle website On 18 October 2013, a not-for-profit association, the Legion of the Bouncy Castle Inc. was established in the state of Victoria, Australia, by the core developers and others to take ownership of the project and support the ongoing development of the APIs.