9 Using GnuTLS as a cryptographic library

GnuTLS is not a low-level cryptographic library, i.e., it does not provide access to basic cryptographic primitives. However it abstracts the internal cryptographic back-end (see Cryptographic Backend), providing symmetric crypto, hash and HMAC algorithms, as well access to the random number generation. For a low-level crypto API the usage of nettle ²¹ library is recommended.