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1.2 Features

The primary advantage of using libfko is it provides a single API for either creating, or parsing of existing SPA data that is fully compatible with the existing Perl-based fwknop implemetation. Other advantages include:

It’s free software

Anybody can use, modify, and redistribute it under the terms of the GNU General Public License (see Library Copying).

It’s lightweight

The Perl-based implementation requires several additional Perl modules and has a relatively large footprint in memory. This C-based library eliminates those dependencies and has a much smaller footprint.

It’s easy

libfko hides many of the gory details of fwknop’s SPA message data format, encoding, encrypting, decrypting, decoding, and parsing. In most cases, only a few function calls will be needed create or parse a SPA message.