Google has waded into the encryption business with an open source cross-platform toolkit called Keyczar that’s supposed to make it easier for ISVs to put cryptography in their applications.

It says Keyczar supports both encryption and authentication with both symmetric and asymmetric keys as well as Java and Python implementations, promising C++ soon.

The toolkit is said to choose safe defaults, automatically tag outputs with key version information and provide a simple interface.

Google said it’s not meant to replace existing cryptographic libraries like OpenSSL, PyCrypto or the Java JCE and is actually built on these libraries. Mostly it’s good at encrypting plain text in memory.

See http://code.google.com/p/keyczar/.