A new Libgcrypt release focuses on maintenance and speed, while improving interoperability through an additional elliptic-curve identifier.
On Wednesday night Libgcrypt 1.12.3 was released. The news comes by way of an email from the project’s maintainer, Werner Koch, on the project’s “announcement” mailing list.
Even if you’ve never heard of Libgcrypt you probably run across it more often than you think. Associated with the GnuPG project, it’s a separate general-purpose cryptographic library that supplies the essential ingredients for building secure software. It includes symmetric encryption algorithms (AES, Camellia, etc.); hash functions (SHA-2, SHA-3, SHAKE, etc.); MAC and authenticated-encryption support (HMAC, CMAC, etc.), and public-key cryptography (like RSA, ECDSA, and post-quantum schemes like ML-KEM). In addition, it provides cryptographically secure random-number generation and large-integer arithmetic.
“This version fixes a couple of minor bugs, introduces an additional name for an existing curve, and provides some performance improvements,” Koch wrote.
His “couple of minor bugs” is an understatement. His email lists 20 bug fixes as well as eight performance enhancements. Six other changes are listed under “other.”
The “curve” he mentions is interesting stuff. He’s referring to an elliptic curve, which is a fixed mathematical formula used in elliptic-curve cryptography, which is what allows software to create public/private key pairs, make digital signatures, and establish shared secret keys with comparatively small keys. Going by his wording, a new cryptographic curve hasn’t been added to the software, but another identifier — or alias — is now recognized.
Source code is hosted on the GnuPG FTP server or on its mirrors. On the primary server are the source tarball and its digital signature, as well as a gzip compressed version for server and signature.
Instructions for checking that the downloaded version of Libgcrypt is unmodified is also available on the gnupg website.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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