ANNOUNCE: Nettle-2.6

[Niels Möller]

I'm happy to annnounce a new version of GNU Nettle, a low-level
cryptographics library. The Nettle home page can be found at
http://www.lysator.liu.se/~nisse/nettle/.

The release is signed using a new gpg key (2560R/28C67298). That key is
also signed by the previous, 13 year old, release key (1024D/A8F4C2FD).

NEWS for the 2.6 release

        Bug fixes:

        * Fixed a bug in ctr_crypt. For zero length (which should be a
          NOP), it sometimes incremented the counter. Reported by Tim
          Kosse.

        * Fixed a small memory leak in nettle_realloc and
          nettle_xrealloc.

        New features:

        * Support for PKCS #5 PBKDF2, to generate a key from a
          password or passphrase. Contributed by Simon Josefsson.
          Specification in RFC 2898 and test vectors in RFC 6070.

        * Support for SHA3.
          
        * Support for the GOST R 34.11-94 hash algorithm. Ported from
          librhash by Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos. Written by Aleksey
          Kravchenko. More information in RFC4357. Test vectors taken
          from the GOST hash wikipedia page.

        Miscellaneous:

        * The include file <nettle/sha.h> has been split into
          <nettle/sha1.h> and <nettle/sha2.h>. For now, sha.h is kept
          for backwards compatibility and it simply includes both
          files, but applications are encouraged to use the new names.
          The new SHA3 functions are declared in <nettle/sha3.h>.

        * Testsuite can be run under valgrind, using

          make check EMULATOR='$(VALGRIND)'

          For this to work, test programs and other executables now
          deallocate storage.
          
        * New configure options --disable-documentation and
          --disable-static. Contributed by Sam Thursfield and Alon
          Bar-Lev, respectively.
          
        * The section on hash functions in the manual is split into
          separate nodes for recommended hash functions and legacy
          hash functions.

        * Various smaller improvements, most of them portability
          fixes. Credits go to David Woodhouse, Tim Rühsen, Martin
          Storsjö, Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos, Fredrik Thulin and Dennis
          Clarke.

        Finally, a note on the naming of the various "SHA" hash
        functions. Naming is a bit inconsistent; we have, e.g.,

          SHA1: sha1_digest
          SHA2: sha256_digest   (not sha2_256_digest)
          SHA3: sha3_256_digest

        Renaming the SHA2 functions to make Nettle's naming more
        consistent has been considered, but the current naming follows
        common usage. Most documents (including the specification for
        SHA2) refer to 256-bit SHA2 as "SHA-256" or "SHA256" rather
        than "SHA2-256".

        The libraries are intended to be binary compatible with
        nettle-2.2 and later. The shared library names are
        libnettle.so.4.5 and libhogweed.so.2.3, with sonames still
        libnettle.so.4 and libhogweed.so.2

Available at

  http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/nettle/nettle-2.6.tar.gz
  ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/nettle/nettle-2.6.tar.gz
  http://www.lysator.liu.se/~nisse/archive/nettle-2.6.tar.gz

and soon also at

  ftp://ftp.lysator.liu.se/pub/security/lsh/nettle-2.6.tar.gz

Happy hacking,
/Niels Möller

-- 
Niels Möller. PGP-encrypted email is preferred. Keyid C0B98E26.
Internet email is subject to wholesale government surveillance.