Botan News

Botan 1.9.10: Constant time AES-128 using SSSE3, dynamic Engines

This new release adds a constant-time AES implementation using SSSE3. This code is based on public domain assembly written by Mike Hamburg and described in his CHES 2009 paper "Accelerating AES with Vector Permute Instructions". In addition to being constant time, it is also significantly faster than the table-based implementation on some processors. The current code has been tested with GCC 4.5, Visual C++ 2008, and Clang 2.8.

Support for dynamically loading Engine objects at runtime was also added. This will be especially useful for algorithm implementations which are in some way hardware dependent (for instance using CUDA). Currently only system that use dlopen-style dynamic linking are supported but a future release should also support Windows.

GCC 4.3 and later support new builtins for byte swapping values which work on a variety of processors. These builtins are now used when possible; this allows for fast byte swapping on platforms which were not previously supported (for instance ARM, PowerPC, and IA-64), and allows better scheduling on x86 processors as well.

This releases drops support for configuring the build with Python 2.4; Python 2.5 or later is now required. At this time, the only current distro that still ships with 2.4 is RedHat Enterprise 5, so this hopefully should not affect too many users.

The class previously named S2K has been renamed PBKDF. This matches the general terminology for algorithms which transform passphrases into keys; the old S2K naming is historical and due to the fact that the first such algorithm added to botan was the one used in PGP, which is called S2K; the algorithms included in PKCS #5, which use the somewhat more conventional PBKDF term, were not added until version 1.1.0.

A bug in 1.9.9 that prevented benchmarking of ECB-mode ciphers was fixed.

If you have 10 minutes, please fill out the user survey. Knowing what users think of the library, how they are using it, and what the trouble spots are will greatly help in terms of improving future releases.

Posted 2010/08/12 in releases; 5 comments

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