Development Roadmap¶
Near Term Plans¶
Here is an outline of the development plans over the next ~12 months, as of February 2026.
Botan2¶
As of 2025-01-01, Botan2 has reached end of life. No further releases are planned.
Botan3¶
The following major feature work is currently planned for Botan3:
SPAKE2+ password authenticated key exchange
BLS12-381
HPKE (RFC 9180)
XMSS^MT
HQC, possibly implemented using Rust
Along with the usual optimizations, bug fixes, and refinements.
Botan4¶
Botan4 is currently planned for release in 2027.
See the current planning discussion in https://github.com/randombit/botan/issues/4666
Botan4 will continue using C++20 rather than adopting a more recent language version.
Botan4 is expected to be largely a subtractive major release; deprecated APIs and functionality will be removed, with few additions.
One notable change planned for Botan4 is that in that 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 corresponding public key type.