[Botan-announce] Release: Botan 1.2.0

[Jack L. <ll...@ac...>]

After a good 8 months of work, Botan 1.2.0 is available for download. The
changes in this release, compared to the last 1.1.x development release, are
minimal. But in comparison to the previous stable version, 1.2.0 is an
incredible upgrade. The following new features are now available:

  * X.509v3 certificates and CRLs (including issue and validation)
  * PKCS #10 certificate requests (issue and processing)
  * PKCS #8 private key storage, with PKCS #5 v2.0 encryption
  * Optional blinding in private key operations, to prevent timing attacks
  * The ability to get an object of any cipher with a single function call
  * A configuration API for controlling all library options
  * EAX, a new cipher mode which encrypts and authenticates messages
  * New crypto algorithms: HAS-160, WiderWake4+1, OMAC

There are many other useful new features not listed, along with a huge number
of optimizations and cleanups. In particular, the public key algorithms should
be significantly faster, even when blinding is enabled.

There are, for various reasons, some source level incompatabilities between the
1.0.x and 1.2.0 releases. Most of the cases are relatively obscure, but feel
free to contact me if you run into problems upgrading.

I believe this release to be stable, and it should run on a wide variety of
systems. Please send me an email if you run into build problems, or if you
successfully run Botan on a less common system (IRIX, AIX, BeOS, etc).

For MS Windows users: Botan is still less than perfect for using on Windows
right now. The next release, 1.2.1, will be easier to build on Windows, and
will offer, at the very least, an EntropySource that uses CAPI.

Regards,
  Jack Lloyd