ANNOUNCE: Nettle-2.5

[Niels Möller]

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 2.5 release

        This release includes important portability fixes for Windows
        and MacOS. There are also a few new features.

        First a *warning*: Some internal functions have been removed
        from the library. Since the functions in question are internal
        and not documented, this is not considered a change of ABI or
        API. Programs explicitly using any of these functions will
        break.
        
        * The function pkcs1_signature_prefix has been renamed to
          _pkcs1_signature_prefix, and with slightly different
          behavior.

        * The file nettle-internal.c is no longer included in the
          library (the features defined there are used by the
          benchmark and test programs, and were never intended for
          public use).

        New features:

        * Support for the salsa20 block cipher, including x86_64
          assembler. Originally contributed by Simon Josefsson, based
          on the reference implementation, then further optimized.

        * Tentative interface for timing-resistant RSA functions,
          contributed by Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos.

        * A more general interface for PKCS#1 signatures, taking the
          input in the form of a "DigestInfo". Suggested by Nikos
          Mavrogiannopoulos.

        Configuration:
        
        * Building of shared libraries (./configure --enable-shared)
          is now enabled by default.

        * Various portability fixes for MacOS and M$ Windows. A lot of
          this work done by Martin Storsjö.

        * In particular, Nettle now hopefully works on 64-bit Windows
          builds, "W64", including the x86_64 assembly code.

        Miscellaneous:
        
        * Documentation and example programs for the base16 and base64
          functions. Was contributed by Jeronimo Pellegrini back in
          2006, but unfortunately forgotten until now.

        * Use an additional table to avoid GF2^8 multiplications in
          aes_invert_key (mainly used by aes_set_decrypt_key). Also
          tabulate round constants in aes_set_encrypt_key.

        * The nettle repository has been migrated from cvs to git,
          with a public repository at
          http://git.lysator.liu.se/nettle. To make it independent of
          the LSH repository, a few files have been moved around.
          While at it, files have also been converted from latin-1 to
          utf-8.

        The libraries are intended to be binary compatible with
        nettle-2.2 and later. The shared library names are
        libnettle.so.4.4 and libhogweed.so.2.2, with sonames still
        libnettle.so.4 and libhogweed.so.2

Available at

  http://www.lysator.liu.se/~nisse/archive/nettle-2.5.tar.gz
  ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/nettle/nettle-2.5.tar.gz

and soon also at

  ftp://ftp.lysator.liu.se/pub/security/lsh/nettle-2.5.tar.gz

Happy hacking,
/Niels Möller

-- 
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