cryptlib consists of a set of layered security services and associated programming interfaces that provide an integrated set of information and communications security capabilities. Much like the network reference model, cryptlib contains a series of layers that provide each level of abstraction, with higher layers building on the capabilities provided by the lower layers.
	At the lowest level are basic components such as core encryption and authentication routines, which are usually implemented in software but may also be implemented in hardware (due to the speed of the software components used in cryptlib, the software is usually faster than dedicated hardware). At the next level are components that wrap up the specialised and often quite complex core components in a layer that provides abstract functionality and ensures complete cross-platform portability of data. These functions typically cover areas such as "create a digital signature" or "exchange an encryption key". At the highest level are extremely powerful and easyto- use functions such as "encrypt a message", "sign a message", "open a secure link", and "create a digital certificate" that require no knowledge of encryption techniques, and that take care of complex issues such as key management, data encoding, en/decryption, and digital signature processing.
	cryptlib's powerful object management interface provides the ability to add encryption and authentication capabilities to an application without needing to know all the low-level details that make the encryption or authentication work. The automatic object-management routines take care of encoding issues and crossplatform portability problems, so that a handful of function calls is all that's needed to wrap up data in signed or encrypted form with all of the associated information and parameters needed to recreate it on the other side of a communications channel. This provides a considerable advantage over other encryption toolkits that often require hundreds of lines of code and the manipulation of complex encryption data structures to perform the same task.
	The software has been developed outside the US and is therefore not covered by US export restrictions and can be used anywhere in the world.