[Cryptopp-announce] Crypto++ 4.0 release

[Wei D. <we...@es...>]

Crypto++ 4.0 has just been released. This version introduces a number of
new features and changes to existing classes. Most significantly, the
BufferedTransformation interface has been changed to support multiple
channels and messages, although backwards compatibility has been
preserved for the most part. Multiple messages basically means instead of
calling Close() on a BufferedTransformation like you used to, you call
MessageEnd(), which serves the same function but also reinitializes the
object to process another message. However some objects may keep state
between messages. Multiple channels is used for things like secret
sharing, where each share is treated as a message on a different channel.
(The old interface for secret sharing wasn't very elegant, but it's still
available for backwards compatibility.)

You can find download instructions for Crypto++ on its home page at
http://www.cryptopp.com.

Updated benchmarks and wider announcements to newsgroups and other
mailing lists will follow shortly.

Crypto++ is a free C++ class library of cryptographic schemes.  Changes
made in version 4.0 include:

- added Skipjack, CAST-256, Panama, SHA-2 (SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512),
  and XTR-DH
- added a faster variant of Rabin's Information Dispersal Algorithm (IDA)
- added class wrappers for these operating system features:
  - high resolution timers on Windows, Unix, and MacOS
  - Berkeley and Windows style sockets
  - Windows named pipes
  - /dev/random and /dev/urandom on Linux and FreeBSD
  - Microsoft's CryptGenRandom on Windows
- added support for SEC 1 elliptic curve key format and compressed points
- added support for X.509 public key format (subjectPublicKeyInfo) for
  RSA, DSA, and elliptic curves
- added support for DER and OpenPGP signature format for DSA
- added support for ZLIB compressed data format (RFC 1950)
- changed elliptic curve encryption to use ECIES (as defined in SEC 1)
- changed MARS key schedule to reflect the latest specification
- changed BufferedTransformation interface to support multiple channels
  and messages
- changed CAST and SHA-1 implementations to use public domain source code
- fixed bug in StringSource
- optmized multi-precision integer code for better performance