An open, community-driven collection of cryptography and performance libraries.
The CryptoHives Open Source Initiative is a collection of modern, high-assurance libraries for .NET, developed and maintained by The Keepers of the CryptoHives. Each package is designed for security, interoperability, and clarity — making it easy to build secure systems for high performance transformation pipelines and for cryptography workloads without sacrificing developer experience.
The CryptoHives .NET Foundation project serves as the first core building block for .NET libraries under the CryptoHives Open Source Initiative umbrella.
Development may use AI-assisted tooling; no guarantee of clean-room provenance is claimed.
- Everything is built with free and open-source tooling — the .NET SDK, Visual Studio Community, VS Code, GitHub, Azure DevOps.
- Packages are meant to stand on their own; we try hard to avoid deep cross-dependencies between them.
- Dependencies on anything outside CryptoHives are kept minimal and limited to widely adopted, well-maintained libraries (e.g.
Microsoft.Extensions.*). - OS and hardware dependencies are avoided where possible, so behavior stays deterministic across platforms and runtimes — this matters especially for the crypto implementations.
- None of this is meant to replace or compete with the existing .NET class library. It's meant to complement it.
- Every package targets high throughput with no steady-state allocations, for both transformation pipelines and crypto workloads.
- Where it helps, algorithms use managed SIMD intrinsics with a scalar fallback for platforms that don't support them.
- Performance and memory usage are benchmarked against reference implementations, not just asserted.
- All implementations are developed without reliance on operating system or native platform crypto providers
- Fully managed implementations of cryptographic algorithms, written from NIST/RFC/ISO specifications and verified against official test vectors
- No OS crypto dependency — deterministic results on every platform, in some cases even outperforming OS implementations
- Review process includes algorithm validation and benchmarking against other OS, .NET or native reference implementations
AI coding assistants (such as Claude and GitHub Copilot) are used in this project as productivity tools — for drafting boilerplate, tests, and documentation, and for reviewing code. Every AI-assisted contribution is reviewed, understood, and validated by a human maintainer before being merged; no code is accepted that the maintainers cannot fully explain and stand behind. Given the security-sensitive nature of this library, all cryptographic logic is verified against the relevant specifications and test vectors regardless of how it was authored. Contributors are welcome to use AI tools under the same principle: you are responsible for the correctness, licensing, and quality of what you submit, and purely machine-generated PRs without human understanding will be rejected.
Security comes first here. If you find a vulnerability, please don't open a public issue — follow the process described on the CryptoHives Security Page instead.
Packages aren't code-signed yet. The Keepers plan to add signing once there's enough demand (and funding) to justify it.
This project is MIT-licensed because we believe in open collaboration. That said, we're aware MIT code gets sometimes copied, repackaged, and resold without credit — if you use this code, we'd appreciate it if you didn't do that:
- Give visible credit to the CryptoHives Open Source Initiative / The Keepers of the CryptoHives and link back to the source.
- Send improvements back upstream and report issues rather than silently forking.
None of that is legally required under MIT — it's just what makes open source worth doing.
Every component is licensed under MIT. Source files carry the following SPDX header by default:
// SPDX-FileCopyrightText: <year> The Keepers of the CryptoHives
// SPDX-License-Identifier: MITA few inherited components use their original MIT-style headers instead, kept as-is for provenance.
The CryptoHives Open Source Initiative is maintained by The Keepers of the CryptoHives, a loose collective of developers working on open, verifiable, high-performance cryptography for .NET.
Issues and pull requests are welcome. Please read the Contributing Guide before sending a PR.
© 2026 The Keepers of the CryptoHives