ANNOUNCE: Nettle-3.7

[Niels Möller]

I'm happy to announce a new release of GNU Nettle, a low-level
cryptographics library. This includes one new feature, and several
optimizations, see NEWS entries below.

The Nettle home page can be found at
https://www.lysator.liu.se/~nisse/nettle/, and the manual at
https://www.lysator.liu.se/~nisse/nettle/nettle.html.

The release can be downloaded from

  https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/nettle/nettle-3.7.tar.gz
  ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/nettle/nettle-3.7.tar.gz
  https://www.lysator.liu.se/~nisse/archive/nettle-3.7.tar.gz

Happy hacking,
/Niels Möller

NEWS for the Nettle 3.7 release

        This release adds one new feature, the bcrypt password hashing
        function, and lots of optimizations. There's also one
        important change to how Nettle is configured: Fat builds are
        now on by default.

        The release adds PowerPC64 assembly for a few algorithms,
        resulting in great speedups. Benchmarked on a Power9 machine,
        speedup was 13 times for AES256-CTR and AES256-GCM, and 3.5
        times for Chacha. For fat builds (now the default), the new
        code is used automatically, on processors supporting the needed
        instruction set extensions.

        The new version is intended to be fully source and binary
        compatible with Nettle-3.6. The shared library names are
        libnettle.so.8.1 and libhogweed.so.6.1, with sonames
        libnettle.so.8 and libhogweed.so.6.

        New features:

        * Support for bcrypt, contributed by Stephen R. van den Berg.

        Optimizations:

        * Much faster AES and GCM on PowerPC64 processors supporting
          the corresponding crypto extensions. Contributed by Mamone
          Tarsha.

        * Speed of Chacha improved on PowerPC64, x86_64 and ARM Neon.

        * Speed of Salsa20 improved on x86_64 and ARM Neon.

        * Overhaul of some elliptic curve primitives, improving ECDSA
          signature speed.

        Configure:

        * Fat builds are enabled by default on the architectures where
          it is supported (x86_64, arm and powerpc64). To disable
          runtime selection, and instead specify the processor flavor
          at configure time, you need to pass --disable-fat to the
          configure script.

        Known issues:

        * The ARM assembly code in this release doesn't work correctly
          on big-endian ARM systems. This will hopefully be fixed in a
          later release.

        Miscellaneous:

        * Use a few more gmp-6.1 functions: mpn_cnd_add_n,
          mpn_cnd_sub_n, mpn_cnd_swap. Delete corresponding internal
          Nettle functions.

        * Convert all assembly files to use the default m4 quote
          characters.

-- 
Niels Möller. PGP-encrypted email is preferred. Keyid 368C6677.
Internet email is subject to wholesale government surveillance.

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