Botan News

Botan 1.10.1 released fixing threading bug

2011-07-11T17:54:00Z

Botan 1.10.1 has been released, fixing the same multithreading bug that affected 1.8.

Botan 1.8.13 released fixing threading bug

2011-07-11T12:08:00Z

Botan 1.8.13 has been released with a fix for a recently discovered bug that could cause crashes in multithreaded code. A full description of the problem can be found on the mailing list.

1.8.12 bug rollup release

2011-06-20T14:40:00Z

Botan 1.8.12 has been released fixing various bugs.

EMSA3(Raw) had a serious bug and would not produce the correct signature if it was used more than once. This only affects situations where you would be signing using EMSA3 but providing the hash value directly, which is quite uncommon.

The --enable-debug build toggle now works correctly, and some bugs affecting builds on Cygwin and Solaris have been fixed. The DataSource_Stream and DataSink_Stream classes would leak memory if opening the file failed.

New stable tree 1.10.0

2011-06-20T14:36:00Z

The 1.9 development cycle has been active for about 21 months, and has now branched to a new stable tree, 1.10. New features now available include SSL (SSLv3, TLS 1.0, and TLS 1.1 are currently supported), the GOST 34.10-2001 signature scheme (a Russian ECC signature standard analogous to ECDSA), the SHA-3 candidates Keccak and Blue Midnight Wish, bcrypt password hashing, XSalsa20, AES key wrapping, and the Comb4P hash combinator.

A lot of work also went into optimizations. The block cipher interface now exposes any possible parallelism available to the implementation, and XTS, CTR, and CBC modes have been changed to use them. SIMD implementations of Serpent, XTEA, Noekeon, and IDEA have been added, as has an implementation of AES using SSSE3 which runs both in constant time and, on recent processors, significantly faster than the usual table based implementation. There have also been numerous optimizations to elliptic curves.

There were also some big changes on the infrastructure side. Botan now offers the option for an amalgamation build, which combines the entire library into a single source file and a single header file, making it easy to deploy as part of a larger application. The standard library can also be built using the amalgamation, allowing for a crude but often quite effective form of whole program analysis by the compiler. The documentation, previously written in LaTeX, is now in reStructuredText, which is converted into HTML with Sphinx. This new format is significantly easier to write, encouraging more documentation to be written and updated. And, indeed, a number of features never before documented are now described in the manual.

As always, writing new code brought to light even more ideas for future projects, like extending the Python wrappers, adding support for using CUDA for parallel operations (useful in high-load environments), making the SSL interface completely event driven, TLS 1.2 support, supporting parallel filters to make use of multicore machines, improvements to X.509 path validation, and on and on. But currently my time is limited, so these projects and many others will have to wait for another day. But you're welcome to send patches. ;)

1.9.18: SSL for Visual Studio, ECC optimizations, portability fixes

2011-06-03T13:34:00Z

This latest release (the fourth and, again, hopefully final release candidate for 1.10) includes new support for compiling the SSL implementation using Visual Studio 2010's TR1 implementation, and a number of new ECC optimizations.

Many new ECC optimizations are available, in many cases improving performance by 20 to 50% over the last release. I would like to thank the anonymous donor who sent me a copy of the Handbook of Elliptic and Hyperelliptic Curve Cryptography from my Amazon wishlist. This was a major inspiration and resource for this new work, and I'd like to thank them for their generous support.

A bug in the GOST 34.10 signature verification meant that an invalid signature could cause an unexpected exception to be thrown from the EC point arithmetic code. This has the potential for denial of service, and anyone using GOST 34.10 signatures should upgrade as soon as possible.

The SSE2 implementation of IDEA now works correctly under the Clang compiler - it turns out that Clang assumes that even SSE2 signed operations do not overflow, and optimizes accordingly. In contrast most other compilers, like GCC, only seem to make this assumption for scalar values (at least as of the latest release).

New standalone functions for base64 decoding have been added, and the Base64_Decoder filter is defined in terms of them.

Bugs causing compilation and installation problems on Solaris have been fixed. Other bugs in BigInt::get_substring and hex_encode were also fixed.

To support concurrent installation of different versions, the header files are now installed into {prefix}/include/botan-1.9/botan, and pkg-config will tell you to include {prefix}/include/botan-1.9. The soname scheme has also changed (details in the change notes), and botan-config is called botan-config-1.9, and will be botan-config-1.10 in 1.10.x.

You can read the full release notes here.