Development Roadmap

Near Term Plans

Here is an outline for the development plans over the next 12-24 months, as of February 2023.

Botan 2

Botan 2 is still supported, but no further feature work is planned. Only security issues and serious bugs will be addressed.

Botan 3

The following future work is currently planned for Botan 3:

  • BSI Project 481 [https://github.com/randombit/botan/issues/3108] will add several new post-quantum algorithms including SPHINCS+ signatures, LMS signatures, FrodoKEM, and Classic McEliece.

  • New ECC based password authenticated key exchanges, to replace SRP. The most likely candidate algorithms are CPace, OPAQUE, or SPAKE2+.

  • Adding an implementation of BLS12-381 elliptic curve pairing.

  • Low level integer math and elliptic curve arithmetic optimizations.

Botan 4

At this time there is no immediate plan for a new major version. When it occurs, it will remove functionality currently marked as deprecated, and adopt a new C++ version. This is unlikely to occur before 2026, at the earliest.

One major change already planned for Botan 4 is that in this release, Public_Key will no longer derive from Private_Key. And similarly, specific private keys (for example RSA_PrivateKey) will no longer derive from their cooresponding public key type.