ANNOUNCE: Nettle-3.8

[email protected] (Niels Möller) Thu, 02 Jun 2022 21:22:05 +0200
Newsgroups	gmane.org.fsf.announce
Message-ID	<cpfr146vpk2.fsf__43986.682121043$1654199998$gmane$org@slartibartfast.lysator.liu.se>
I'm happy to announce a new release of GNU Nettle, a low-level
cryptographics library. This includes a few new features, 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-3.8.tar.gz
  ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/nettle/nettle-3.8.tar.gz
  https://www.lysator.liu.se/~nisse/archive/nettle-3.8.tar.gz

Happy hacking,
/Niels Möller

NEWS for the Nettle 3.8 release

	This release includes a couple of new features, and many
	performance improvements. It adds assembly code for two more
	architectures: ARM64 and S390x.

	The new version is intended to be fully source and binary
	compatible with Nettle-3.6. The shared library names are
	libnettle.so.8.5 and libhogweed.so.6.5, with sonames
	libnettle.so.8 and libhogweed.so.6.

	New features:

	* AES keywrap (RFC 3394), contributed by Nicolas Mora.

	* SM3 hash function, contributed by Tianjia Zhang.

	* New functions cbc_aes128_encrypt, cbc_aes192_encrypt,
	  cbc_aes256_encrypt.

	  On processors where AES is fast enough, e.g., x86_64 with
	  aesni instructions, the overhead of using Nettle's general
	  cbc_encrypt can be significant. The new functions can be
	  implemented in assembly, to do multiple blocks with reduced
	  per-block overhead.

	  Note that there's no corresponding new decrypt functions,
	  since the general cbc_decrypt doesn't suffer from the same
	  performance problem.

	Bug fixes:

	* Fix fat builds for x86_64 windows, these appear to never
          have worked.

	Optimizations:

	* New ARM64 implementation of AES, GCM, Chacha, SHA1 and
	  SHA256, for processors supporting crypto extensions. Great
	  speedups, and fat builds are supported. Contributed by
	  Mamone Tarsha.

	* New s390x implementation of AES, GCM, Chacha, memxor, SHA1,
	  SHA256, SHA512 and SHA3. Great speedups, and fat builds are
	  supported. Contributed by Mamone Tarsha.

	* New PPC64 assembly for ecc modulo/redc operations,
	  contributed by Amitay Isaacs, Martin Schwenke and Alastair
	  D´Silva.

	* The x86_64 AES implementation using aesni instructions has
	  been reorganized with one separate function per key size,
	  each interleaving the processing of two blocks at a time
	  (when the caller processes multiple blocks with each call).
	  This gives a modest performance improvement on some
	  processors.

	* Rewritten and faster x86_64 poly1305 assembly.

	Known issues:

	* Nettle's testsuite doesn't work out-of-the-box on recent
	  MacOS, due to /bin/sh discarding the DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH
	  environment variable. Nettle's test scripts handle this in
	  some cases, but currently fails the test cases that are
	  themselves written as /bin/sh scripts. As a workaround, use

	  make check EMULATOR='env DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=$(TEST_SHLIB_DIR)'

	Miscellaneous:

	* Updated manual to current makeinfo conventions, with no
	  explicit node pointers. Generate pdf version with texi2pdf,
	  to get working hyper links.

	* Added square root functions for NIST ecc curves, as a
	  preparation for supporting compact point representation.

	* Reworked internal GCM/ghash interfaces, simplifying assembly
	  implementations. Deleted unused GCM C implementation
	  variants with less than 8-bit lookup table.

-- 
Niels Möller. PGP key CB4962D070D77D7FCB8BA36271D8F1FF368C6677.
Internet email is subject to wholesale government surveillance.
signature.asc (application/pgp-signature, 487 B)