NEWS for the Nettle 3.8 release
This release includes a couple of new features, and many
performance improvements. It adds assembly code for two more
architectures: ARM64 and S390x.
The new version is intended to be fully source and binary
compatible with Nettle-3.6. The shared library names are
libnettle.so.8.5 and libhogweed.so.6.5, with sonames
libnettle.so.8 and libhogweed.so.6.
New features:
* AES keywrap (RFC 3394), contributed by Nicolas Mora.
* SM3 hash function, contributed by Tianjia Zhang.
* New functions cbc_aes128_encrypt, cbc_aes192_encrypt,
cbc_aes256_encrypt.
On processors where AES is fast enough, e.g., x86_64 with
aesni instructions, the overhead of using Nettle's general
cbc_encrypt can be significant. The new functions can be
implemented in assembly, to do multiple blocks with reduced
per-block overhead.
Note that there's no corresponding new decrypt functions,
since the general cbc_decrypt doesn't suffer from the same
performance problem.
Bug fixes:
* Fix fat builds for x86_64 windows, these appear to never
have worked.
Optimizations:
* New ARM64 implementation of AES, GCM, Chacha, SHA1 and
SHA256, for processors supporting crypto extensions. Great
speedups, and fat builds are supported. Contributed by
Mamone Tarsha.
* New s390x implementation of AES, GCM, Chacha, memxor, SHA1,
SHA256, SHA512 and SHA3. Great speedups, and fat builds are
supported. Contributed by Mamone Tarsha.
* New PPC64 assembly for ecc modulo/redc operations,
contributed by Amitay Isaacs, Martin Schwenke and Alastair
D´Silva.
* The x86_64 AES implementation using aesni instructions has
been reorganized with one separate function per key size,
each interleaving the processing of two blocks at a time
(when the caller processes multiple blocks with each call).
This gives a modest performance improvement on some
processors.
* Rewritten and faster x86_64 poly1305 assembly.
Known issues:
* Nettle's testsuite doesn't work out-of-the-box on recent
MacOS, due to /bin/sh discarding the DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH
environment variable. Nettle's test scripts handle this in
some cases, but currently fails the test cases that are
themselves written as /bin/sh scripts. As a workaround, use
make check EMULATOR='env DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=$(TEST_SHLIB_DIR)'
Miscellaneous:
* Updated manual to current makeinfo conventions, with no
explicit node pointers. Generate pdf version with texi2pdf,
to get working hyper links.
* Added square root functions for NIST ecc curves, as a
preparation for supporting compact point representation.
* Reworked internal GCM/ghash interfaces, simplifying assembly
implementations. Deleted unused GCM C implementation
variants with less than 8-bit lookup table.
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