I'm happy to announce a new release of GNU Nettle, a low-level cryptographics library. This includes one new feature, and several optimizations, see NEWS entries below.

The Nettle home page can be found at https://www.lysator.liu.se/~nisse/nettle/, and the manual at https://www.lysator.liu.se/~nisse/nettle/nettle.html.

The release can be downloaded from

https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/nettle/nettle-3.7.tar.gz ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/nettle/nettle-3.7.tar.gz https://www.lysator.liu.se/~nisse/archive/nettle-3.7.tar.gz

Happy hacking, /Niels Möller

NEWS for the Nettle 3.7 release

This release adds one new feature, the bcrypt password hashing function, and lots of optimizations. There's also one important change to how Nettle is configured: Fat builds are now on by default.

The release adds PowerPC64 assembly for a few algorithms, resulting in great speedups. Benchmarked on a Power9 machine, speedup was 13 times for AES256-CTR and AES256-GCM, and 3.5 times for Chacha. For fat builds (now the default), the new code is used automatically, on processors supporting the needed instruction set extensions.

The new version is intended to be fully source and binary compatible with Nettle-3.6. The shared library names are libnettle.so.8.1 and libhogweed.so.6.1, with sonames libnettle.so.8 and libhogweed.so.6.

New features:

* Support for bcrypt, contributed by Stephen R. van den Berg.

Optimizations:

* Much faster AES and GCM on PowerPC64 processors supporting the corresponding crypto extensions. Contributed by Mamone Tarsha.

* Speed of Chacha improved on PowerPC64, x86_64 and ARM Neon.

* Speed of Salsa20 improved on x86_64 and ARM Neon.

* Overhaul of some elliptic curve primitives, improving ECDSA signature speed.

Configure:

* Fat builds are enabled by default on the architectures where it is supported (x86_64, arm and powerpc64). To disable runtime selection, and instead specify the processor flavor at configure time, you need to pass --disable-fat to the configure script.

Known issues:

* The ARM assembly code in this release doesn't work correctly on big-endian ARM systems. This will hopefully be fixed in a later release.

Miscellaneous:

* Use a few more gmp-6.1 functions: mpn_cnd_add_n, mpn_cnd_sub_n, mpn_cnd_swap. Delete corresponding internal Nettle functions.

* Convert all assembly files to use the default m4 quote characters.