I've recently had a situation in which a recommendation for an easy-to-use, hard-to-misuse cryptographic library for Java was required. The first choice was Google's [Tink](https://github.com/google/tink), since it was designed specifically for that purpose. Given it's association with Google, the customer was not too thrilled and asked for alternatives.

[libhydrogen](https://github.com/jedisct1/libhydrogen) came to mind, which had a Java wrapper called [Hydride](https://github.com/libly/hydride-java), and was also designed to be easy-to-use and hard-to-misuse. However, libhydrogen only supports NORX v3.0 AEAD as the algorithm for [secret-key encryption](https://github.com/jedisct1/libhydrogen/wiki/Secret-key-encryption#algorithm), which is based on Gimli permutations. [Hashes and HMACs](https://github.com/jedisct1/libhydrogen/wiki/Generic-hashing#algorithm) offered by libhydrogen are based on Gimli hash functions as well.

I have to admit, I've never heard of Gimli permutations, and I am not nearly skilled enough in cryptography to perform cryptoanalysis myself. As such, I hesitate to fully recommend libhydrogen as alternative to Tink. **Can libhydrogen and its Gimli permutations be considered production-ready?**