I'm happy to announce a new version of GNU Nettle, a low-level cryptographic library. Unlike earlier releases, nettle is now licenced under the LGPL, rather then the GPL. The nettle home page can be found at http://www.lysator.liu.se/~nisse/nettle/

NEWS for the 2.2 release

Licensing change: * Relicensed as LGPL v2.1 or later (user's option).

* Replaced blowfish and serpent implementation. New code is based on the LGPLed code in libgcrypt.

New features:

* Support for Galois/Counter Mode (GCM).

* New interface for enumerating (most) available algorithms, contributed by Daniel Kahn Gillmor.

* New tool nettle-hash. Can generate hash digests using any supported hash function, with output compatible with md5sum and friends from GNU coreutils. Checking (like md5sum -c) not yet implemented.

Bug fixes:

* The old serpent code had a byte order bug (introduced by yours truly about ten years ago). New serpent implementation does not interoperate with earlier versions of nettle.

* Fixed ABI-dependent libdir default for Linux-based systems which do not follow the Linux File Hierarchy Standard, e.g., Debian GNU/Linux.

Optimizations: * x86_64 implemention of serpent.

* x86_64 implemention of camellia.

* Optimized memxor using word rather than byte operations. Both generic C and x86_64 assembler.

* Eliminated a memcpy for in-place CBC decrypt. Miscellaneous:

* In command line tools, no longer support -? for requesting help, since using it without shell quoting is a dangerous habit. Use long option --help instead.

The shared library names are libnettle.so.4.1 and libhogweed.so.2.1, with sonames libnettle.so.4 and libhogweed.so.2.

Available at

http://www.lysator.liu.se/~nisse/archive/nettle-2.2.tar.gz ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/nettle/nettle-2.2.tar.gz

Happy hacking, /Niels Möller