1.9.3: Adding AES-NI and format preserving encryption
Botan 1.9.3 was released this evening.A new engine, aes_isa_eng, adds hooks for CPU-specific
implementations of AES. Currently supported is an implementation for
Intel's AES-NI; while no currently shipping CPU has support for AES-NI
yet, the code was tested using Intel's SDE.
The engine may be extended in the future to support VIA's PadLock
instructions or other similar extensions.
An implementation of format-preserving encryption (FPE) was added. FPE allows for encrypting data in such a way that format constraints are retained. An example which uses this to encrypt credit card numbers with valid Luhn checksums to other credit card numbers with valid checksums is available.
An interface change in how X.509 certificates and PKCS #10 certificate requests are created now allows for using arbitrary hash functions; previously the use of SHA-1 was hardcoded, which is particularly undesirable given the currently known attacks on that algorithm.
The implementations of MARS, Skipjack, and AES were optimized to varying degrees.
The previous release added support for AltiVec but it was not
enabled unless a macro was set by hand. Now it is set by default if
the build is configured for a G4, G5, POWER6 or POWER7 processor (all
of which include AltiVec in all known configurations). A similar
mechanism sets macros indicating support for SSE2 and SSSE3 (though
SSSE3 is not currently used in the codebase), and for AES-NI. Support
for a particular ISA extension can also be enabled at build time by
using the new --with-isa-extension option to
configure.py.
The default build for Windows is now a DLL, mostly due to the much smaller size of the resulting binary. This is particularly important because this release also adds support for packaging botan using the InnoSetup Windows installer program. This should definitely be considered experimental, but seems to work. You can download an installer for 1.9.3 right now. Comments on the quality of the Windows installer or ways it could be improved would be heartily welcomed.
Posted in releases at 2009/11/19 22:59; 3 comments
Botan 1.8.8 and 1.9.2 were released this afternoon.
1.8.8 has only minor changes - the Skein-512 implementation was updated to the tweaked 1.2 specification, and a bug that prevented the use of the x86 bswap instruction was fixed.
1.9.2 extends the SIMD work done so far in the 1.9 series with a
new type SIMD_32 which is a lightweight wrapper around SSE2
and AltiVec intrinsics (as well as a purely scalar version which will
work anywhere). The idea is to provide a convenient syntax for SIMD
operations that will compile down to code as efficient as normal
intrinsics code.
The existing SSE2 Serpent code was modified to use this new type with great success on the SSE2 side. However some oddities remain in the AltiVec; for some reason GCC refuses to inline a particular constructor, which causes a great deal of overhead. At the moment, it actually appears to be faster to use the scalar implementation instead of AltiVec or the regular C++ on both a G4 and G5 running Linux! While a great testament to the superscalar power of these processors, it hints that AltiVec unfettered by strange inlining problems would be even faster.
Partially unrolling the message expansion loop in SHA-1 and SHA-2 produced small but measurable speedups (around 5 to 10% on a Core2).
Posted in releases at 2009/11/03 14:14; 0 comments
The site has joined the 20th century and it is now possible to leave comments on news items. Spam filtering on comments is provided by Akismet; I've been using Akismet for comments for a while on bitbashing, so far so good.
Posted in announcements at 2009/10/29 09:59; 1 comment
1.9.1: Blue Midnight Wish, Skein 1.2, improved Python wrappers, and more
Botan 1.9.1 was released today with a slew of new features.
An implementation of the SHA-3 candidate hash function Blue Midnight Wish has been added. Blue Midnight Wish is one of the fastest functions of the round 2 candidates, processing well over 300 MB per second on a Core2 processor; it runs about as fast as OpenSSL's assembly implementation of SHA-1. The version in 1.9.1 is the 'tweaked' round 2 variant; as part of the NIST competition, at the start of the second round all designers had a chance to make modifications to their algorithms before the next phase of analysis begins. Only the 512-bit variant of Blue Midnight Wish is included, because it is much faster than the 256-bit version on modern processors (and, presumably, is more secure).
Another NIST round 2 tweak is for the implementation of Skein-512 - the designers of Skein used a new search technique and found a new set of rotation constants leading to much better diffusion in the algorithm. These new rotation constants are now being used.
The wrappers for other languages, especially Python, are greatly improved. Documentation is currently sparse, but to build the wrappers, use
$ ./configure.py --use-boost-python [other configure.py options]
$ make check
# normal library build
$ make -f Makefile.python
# builds _botan.so in build/botan-python
$ make -f Makefile.python install
# installs botan module into python site-packages
Boost.Python is required to build the Python wrappers. Some
examples of use can be found in doc/python.
An implementation of threshold secret sharing has been added, going off the recent internet draft draft-mcgrew-tss-02.txt ("Threshold Secret Sharing", David A. McGrew, Praveen Patnala, Alfred Hoenes).
Runtime CPU detection is now used on x86/x86-64 processors; currently it is only used to check for the availability of SSE2 but other uses may be added in the future (for instance, checking for the existence of Intel's forthcoming AES-NI instructions). Additionally, use of SSE2 implementations is now enabled under Visual C++ as well as GNU C++ and Intel C++.
XTEA was optimized, and is over twice as fast on an Intel Core2 or AMD Opteron.
Posted in releases at 2009/10/23 10:25; 0 comments
Upcoming Improvements to the Python Bindings
The Python bindings for botan are being substantially reworked and expanded in the next development release, and will soon become an officially supported feature.
A quick taste of some of the current interfaces follows after the break.
Posted in devnotes at 2009/10/13 18:16; 0 comments
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