noble cryptography is a high-security, easily auditable set of contained cryptographic libraries with the following features:

  • Zero or minimal dependencies
  • Highly readable TypeScript / JS code
  • PGP-signed releases and transparent NPM builds

The idea was to: 1) improve knowledge of cryptography 2) improve supply chain security of JS ecosystem 3) provide libraries that could be used for learning, because other libs are too low-level / unfriendly to beginners.

Noble has been audited 7 times by external security firms. It is used by MetaMask, ethers.js, viem, Protonmail, Tutanota, polkadot.js, solana-web3.js and, as of Aug 2026, over 1.6M open-source repositories: 740K for hashes, 415K for curves, 350K for secp256k1, 75K for ciphers, 70K for ed25519. Weekly npm downloads: 63M for hashes, 24M for curves, 23M for ciphers, 2.6M for ed25519, 1.1M for secp256k1, 220K for post-quantum.

Usage

// npm install @noble/curves @noble/hashes
import { secp256k1 } from '@noble/curves/secp256k1.js';

const priv = secp256k1.utils.randomSecretKey();
const pub = secp256k1.getPublicKey(priv);
const msg = new TextEncoder().encode('hello noble');
const sig = secp256k1.sign(msg, priv);
const isValid = secp256k1.verify(sig, msg, pub);

Active projects:

  • ciphers (github, npm): cryptographic ciphers, including Salsa20, ChaCha and AES
  • curves (github, npm): elliptic curve cryptography, including secp256k1, ed25519, ed448, NIST / Brainpool curves, bn254, bls12-381, schnorr, hash-to-curve, FROST, Poseidon
    • Smaller 5kb “single-curve” versions of library: secp256k1 (github, npm) and ed25519 (github, npm)
  • hashes (github, npm): hash functions, MACs & KDFs, including SHA, RIPEMD, BLAKE, HMAC, HKDF, PBKDF & Scrypt
  • post-quantum (github, npm): PQ algorithms, including ML-KEM, ML-DSA, SLH-DSA, FN-DSA (aka Kyber, Dilithium, SPHINCS+ and Falcon) and hybrids
  • awasm-noble (github, npm): ultra-fast WASM version of hashes & ciphers

The code is also available on gitlab, codeberg and jsr. The project can be funded using github. Current large sponsors include wevm & vault12.

History

scure

Noble’s non-cryptographic sister project. Audited micro-libraries:

  • Jan 2022: base base64, bech32…, bip32 hdkey, bip39 mnemonics
  • Feb 2023: btc-signer transactions, segwit, taproot, psbt, multisig
  • Sep 2023: starknet stark curve, pedersen and poseidon hash
  • Jun 2025: sr25519 polkadot cryptography: sr25519, Merlin, Strobe, HDKD, VRF
  • Apr 2026: new hardened releases, with deep, LLM-assisted self-audit

Learning

The interactive demos at the bottom of this page visualize the EC group law, the discrete logarithm problem, the hash avalanche effect and authenticated encryption. To go deeper:

Interactive demos