Crown Crypto Library Released: A Developer-Friendly Rust Crypto Toolkit

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Hi everyone!

I’ve just released a new cryptography library on crates.io — crown — along with its command-line companion crown-bin.
The GitHub release also provides C FFI headers and libraries, so it can be easily used from C or other languages.

:puzzle_piece: About Crown

Crown is a developer-oriented cryptography library designed to be both easy to use and flexible.
It currently includes:

  • AEAD encryption
  • Stream ciphers
  • Block ciphers
  • Hash functions

The library integrates Wycheproof and Cryptography test suites to ensure correctness and compatibility.
It supports no_std environments and provides an EVP-like interface, similar to OpenSSL, for higher-level use cases.

:toolbox: crown-bin

crown-bin is a CLI utility that lets you experiment with Crown’s algorithms —
useful for quick tests, performance checks, or generating sample data.

You can try it by:

cargo install crown-bin

crown --help

:rocket: Motivation

I’ve been working in the field of applied cryptography for over two years.
Earlier, I was involved in DDS Security development, and later worked on a custom network protocol that relied heavily on cryptography.

While using existing libraries, I ran into a few challenges:

  • aws-lc-rs is difficult to cross-compile.
  • ring: the encryption algorithm provided by ring are very limited.
  • RustCrypto crates are powerful but quite complex to use directly.

That’s why I decided to build Crown — a developer-friendly crypto library with clear interfaces, solid correctness, and the goal of strong performance in the future.

:compass: Current Status

This is an early preview release.
I’d love to get feedback on the API design, usability, and performance.
Any suggestions or ideas are very welcome! :raising_hands: