I'm happy to annnounce a new version of GNU Nettle, a low-level cryptographics library. The Nettle home page can be found at http://www.lysator.liu.se/~nisse/nettle/.

NEWS for the 2.7 release

This release includes an implementation of elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) and optimizations for the ARM architecture. This work was done at the offices of South Pole AB, and generously funded by the .SE Internet Fund.

Bug fixes:

* Fixed a bug in the buffer handling for incremental SHA3 hashing, with a possible buffer overflow. Patch by Edgar E. Iglesias.

New features:

* Support for ECDSA signatures. Elliptic curve operations over the following curves: secp192r1, secp224r1, secp256r1, secp384r1 and secp521r1, including x86_64 and ARM assembly for the most important primitives. * Support for UMAC, including x86_64 and ARM assembly.

* Support for 12-round salsa20, "salsa20r12", as specified by eSTREAM. Contributed by Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos. Optimizations:

* ARM assembly code for several additional algorithms, including AES, Salsa20, and the SHA family of hash functions.

* x86_64 assembly for SHA256, SHA512, and SHA3. (SHA3 assembly was included in the 2.6 release, but disabled due to poor performance on some AMD processors. Hopefully, that performance problem is fixed now). The ARM code was tested and benchmarked on Cortex-A9. Some of the functions use "neon" instructions. The configure script decides if neon instructions can be used, and the command line options --enable-arm-neon and --disable-arm-neon can be used to override its choice. Feedback appreciated. The libraries are intended to be binary compatible with nettle-2.2 and later. The shared library names are libnettle.so.4.6 and libhogweed.so.2.4, with sonames still libnettle.so.4 and libhogweed.so.2.

http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/nettle/nettle-2.7.tar.gz ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/nettle/nettle-2.7.tar.gz http://www.lysator.liu.se/~nisse/archive/nettle-2.7.tar.gz ftp://ftp.lysator.liu.se/pub/security/lsh/nettle-2.7.tar.gz (soon)

Happy hacking, /Niels Möller