Botan 1.8.3: Skein-512, XTS mode, new Python build system
A new release of botan is tagged in the monotone repository, and tarballs are available.
This release adds an implementation of the SHA-3 candidate Skein-512 hash. The implementation of Skein included in botan seems to be competitive in performance with SHA-1, SHA-256, and even MD5 on many 64 bit processors; it is 20% faster than the MD5 implementation included in OpenSSL on a IBM POWER5 processor.
The XTS block cipher mode from IEEE P1619 has also been added. XTS is used for disk encryption and may be useful in other contexts, for instance in database encryption.
A new configuration system written in Python has been added. This
script is about half of the length of the Perl version which has been
in use since botan was first released 8 years ago, and additionally is
much easier to understand and modify. Currently Python 2.5 or higher
is required (Jython 2.5 works as well, IronPython and PyPy have not
been tested), though Python 2.4 may work if an updated version of the
Optik library is
installed to replace the version included in the Python 2.4 standard
library. The Perl configure is still included and supported, but is
now deprecated, and will be removed at a later date. Please try
configure.py on your system; if it doesn't work for you, file
a bug about it and continue using configure.pl.
A number of users have reported problems with entropy polling in 1.8.2; these issues should now be resolved.
Devai Tamas pointed out that random_prime did not work
correctly when generating a prime of 2, 3, or 4 bits in length; this
has now been fixed. In further testing, it was discovered that
generating primes less than 7 bits also had various issues. Now
random_prime should be able to generate primes of any bit
size.
This release also fixes several small bugs including DataSource::discard_next not returning the correct number of discarded bytes, adding a default value to the parameter to AutoSeeded_RNG::reseed, for API compatibility with 1.8.0, and Gentoo bug 272242.
The shared object generated by this release has a soname of 1.8.2, the same as the previous release. This should allow applications compiled against 1.8.2 to work with 1.8.3 as well. However this is an experimental feature and caution is advised; if odd behavior is observed in applications compiled against 1.8.2 but linked against 1.8.3, recompiling your applications would be advised.
Posted in releases at 2009/07/11 12:04; 0 comments
< Botan 1.8.2: Entropy seeding improvements, GOST 34.11 hash function | Botan 1.8.4: Minor fix for 1.8.3 >