The new development tree, 1.5.x, has been progressing well so far. 1.5.1 is now out, which adds Montgomery exponentiation, generalized Karatsuba multiplication and squaring, and Comba squaring. Overall performance seems very good in comparison to 1.4.11, though profiling indicates there are a few troublesome hotspots, most particularly in the pooling allocator (profiling RSA operations with KCachegrind indicates that operations in the pooling allocator uses up nearly 30% of the total runtime). Another, less problematic one, is the multiple precision addition function - this routine was never optimized much (because it wasn't a hotspot), but with the new Karatsuba and Montgomery code, it is being used much more heavily now (and currently taking up 15% of total runtime for RSA). Optimizing this routine will be a priority for the next releaswever it is a very nice design, and much faster than SHA-256, so hopefully it will get some good analysis.
Other changes include optimizations for RC6 and Twofish, much better support for 64-bit PowerPC, support for high resolution hardware timers on most PowerPC systems, fixing a persistent build annoyance that shows up on BSD systems, and generalizing the X9.31 RNG to support arbitrary block ciphers as well as arbitrary underlying PRNG objects.
Posted 2006/01/08 in releases; no comments
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