ANNOUNCE: Nettle-3.5 - nettle-bugs

26 Jun 2019


      I'm happy to announce a new release of GNU Nettle, a low-level
cryptographics library. This release includes a couple of new features
and improved performance.
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-3.5.tar.gz
  ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/nettle/nettle-3.5.tar.gz
  https://www.lysator.liu.se/~nisse/archive/nettle-3.5.tar.gz
Regards,
/Niels
NEWS for the Nettle 3.5 release
This release adds a couple of new features and optimizations,
    and deletes or deprecates a few obsolete features. It is *not*
    binary (ABI) compatible with earlier versions. Except for
    deprecations listed below, it is intended to be fully
    source-level (API) compatible with Nettle-3.4.1.
The shared library names are libnettle.so.7.0 and
    libhogweed.so.5.0, with sonames libnettle.so.7 and
    libhogweed.so.5.
Changes in behavior:
* Nettle's gcm_crypt will now call the underlying block cipher
      to process more than one block at a time. This is not a
      change to the documented behavior, but unfortunately breaks
      assumptions accidentally made in GnuTLS, up to and including
      version 3.6.1.
New features:
* Support for CFB8 (Cipher Feedback Mode, processing a single
      octet per block cipher operation), contributed by Dmitry
      Eremin-Solenikov.
* Support for CMAC (RFC 4493), contributed by Nikos
      Mavrogiannopoulos.
* Support for XTS mode, contributed by Simo Sorce.
Optimizations:
* Improved performance of the x86_64 AES implementation using
      the aesni instructions. Gives a large speedup for operations
      processing multiple blocks at a time (including CTR mode,
      GCM mode, and CBC decrypt, but *not* CBC encrypt).
* Improved performance for CTR mode, for the common case of
      16-byte block size. Pass more data at a time to underlying
      block cipher, and fill the counter blocks more efficiently.
      Extension to also handle GCM mode efficiently contributed
      by Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos.
* New x86_64 implementation of sha1 and sha256, for processors
      supporting the sha_ni instructions. Speedup of 3-5 times on
      affected processors.
* Improved parameters for the precomputation of tables used
      for ecc signatures. Roughly 10%-15% speedup of the ecdsa
      sign operation using the secp_256r1, secp_384r1 and
      secp_521r1 curves, and 25% speedup of ed25519 sign
      operation, benchmarked on x86_64. Table sizes unchanged,
      around 16 KB per curve.
* In ARM fat builds, automatically select Neon implementation
      of Chacha, where possible. Contributed by Yuriy M.
      Kaminskiy.
Deleted features:
* The header file des-compat.h and everything declared therein
      has been deleted, as announced earlier. This file provided a
      subset of the old libdes/ssleay/openssl interface for DES
      and triple-DES. DES is still supported, via the functions
      declared in des.h.
* Functions using the old struct aes_ctx have been marked as
      deprecated. Use the fixed key size interface instead, e.g.,
      struct aes256_ctx, introduced in Nettle-3.0.
* The header file nettle-stdint.h, and corresponding autoconf
      tests, have been deleted. Nettle now requires that the
      compiler/libc provides <stdint.h>.
Miscellaneous:
* Support for big-endian ARM systems, contributed by Michael
      Weiser.
* The programs aesdata, desdata, twofishdata, shadata and
      gcmdata are no longer built by default. Makefile
      improvements contributed by Jay Foad.
* The "example" program examples/eratosthenes.c has been
      deleted.
* The contents of hash context structs, and the deprecated
      aes_ctx struct, have been reorganized, to enable later
      optimizations.
-- 
Niels Möller. PGP-encrypted email is preferred. Keyid 368C6677.
Internet email is subject to wholesale government surveillance.