1.9.8 Released: Windows x64 optimizations, timing attack countermeasures
Botan 1.9.8 has been released.
Botan now makes use of 64 bit multiplications under Visual C++ on 64 bit platforms. This has only been tested on x86-64 but should also work on IA-64 machines. This optimization can easily double the performance of public key algorithms on 64 bit Windows.
Possible timing attacks against OAEP decoding and in the IDEA block cipher were addressed in changes in this release.
The --use-boost-python option was renamed --with-boost-python; this makes it easier to integrate with some packaging systems. There is also a --without-boost-python if you want to be explicit about not building the Python wrappers.
The FORK-256 hash function has been removed; it was definitively broken in papers published over the last couple of years, and was never widely used.
A bug that prevented creating DSA kosherized groups with p being 512 or 768 bits long was fixed. Do note though that using DSA keys of this size is quite unwise, as they can probably be broken with only relatively minimal effort.
Minor problems that prevented out of the box compilation with LLVM's Clang compiler, and with GCC versions before 4.3 on x86, were fixed.
Posted 2010/06/14 in releases; no comments
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