News entries for Nettle-3.7.

2 files changed, 46 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/ChangeLog b/ChangeLog
index e7ff8949..2c70f387 100644
--- a/ChangeLog
+++ b/ChangeLog
@@ -1,5 +1,7 @@
 2020-12-26  Niels Möller  <nisse@lysator.liu.se>
 
+	* NEWS: News entries for Nettle-3.7.
+
 	* Makefile.in (distdir): Distribute the README files in assembly
 	directories.
 
diff --git a/NEWS b/NEWS
index 217c86ff..9de1c4bc 100644
--- a/NEWS
+++ b/NEWS
@@ -1,3 +1,47 @@
+NEWS for the Nettle 3.7 release
+
+	This release adds one new feature, the bcrypt password hashing
+	function, and lots of optimizations.
+
+	The release adds PowerPC64 assembly for a few algorithms,
+	resulting in great speedups. Benchmarked on a Power9 machine,
+	speedup was 13 times for AES256-CTR and AES256-GCM, and 3.5
+	times for Chacha. Since the new PowerPC64 code depends on
+	optional instructions, it is not enabled by default. The
+	recommended way to enable it, with runtime detection of
+	available instructions, is to configure with --enable-fat.
+
+	The new version is intended to be fully source and binary
+	compatible with Nettle-3.6. The shared library names are
+	libnettle.so.8.1 and libhogweed.so.6.1, with sonames
+	libnettle.so.8 and libhogweed.so.6.
+
+	New features:
+
+	* Support for bcrypt, contributed by Stephen R. van den Berg.
+
+	Optimizations:
+
+	* Much faster AES and GCM on PowerPC64 processors supporting
+	  the corresponding crypto extensions. Contributed by Mamone
+	  Tarsha.
+
+	* Speed of Chacha improved on PowerPC64, x86_64 and ARM Neon.
+
+	* Speed of Salsa20 improved on x86_64 and ARM Neon.
+
+	* Overhaul of some elliptic curve primitives, improving ECDSA
+	  signature speed.
+
+	Miscellaneous:
+
+	* Use a few more gmp-6.1 functions: mpn_cnd_add_n,
+	  mpn_cnd_sub_n, mpn_cnd_swap. Delete corresponding internal
+	  Nettle functions.
+
+	* Convert all assembly files to use the default m4 quote
+	  characters.
+
 NEWS for the Nettle 3.6 release
 
 	This release adds a couple of new features, most notable being