1 Crypto Release Notes

This document describes the changes made to the Crypto application.

1.1  Crypto 3.7.3

Improvements and New Features

  • The implementation of the key exchange algorithms diffie-hellman-group-exchange-sha* are optimized, up to a factor of 11 for the slowest ( = biggest and safest) group size.

    Own Id: OTP-14169 Aux Id: seq-13261

1.2  Crypto 3.7.2

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • The crypto application has been fixed to not use RC2 against OpenSSL built with RC2 disabled.

    Own Id: OTP-13895 Aux Id: PR-1163

  • The crypto application has been fixed to not use RC4 against OpenSSL built with RC4 disabled.

    Own Id: OTP-13896 Aux Id: PR-1169

Improvements and New Features

  • To ease troubleshooting, erlang:load_nif/2 now includes the return value from a failed call to load/reload/upgrade in the text part of the error tuple. The crypto NIF makes use of this feature by returning the source line where/if the initialization fails.

    Own Id: OTP-13951

1.3  Crypto 3.7.1

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • Crypto has been fixed to work against OpenSSL versions with disabled DES ciphers. Correct spelling of cipher algorithm 'des3_cfb' has been introduced; the previous misspeling still works.

    Own Id: OTP-13783 Aux Id: ERL-203

  • The size of an internal array in crypto has been fixed to not segfault when having all possible ciphers. Bug fix by Duncan Overbruck.

    Own Id: OTP-13789 Aux Id: PR-1140

1.4  Crypto 3.7

Improvements and New Features

  • Refactor crypto to use the EVP interface of OpenSSL, which is the recommended interface that also enables access to hardware acceleration for some operations.

    Own Id: OTP-12217

  • Add support for 192-bit keys for the aes_cbc cipher.

    Own Id: OTP-13206 Aux Id: pr 832

  • Add support for 192-bit keys for aes_ecb.

    Own Id: OTP-13207 Aux Id: pr829

  • Deprecate the function crypto:rand_bytes and make sure that crypto:strong_rand_bytes is used in all places that are cryptographically significant.

    Own Id: OTP-13214

  • Enable AES-GCM encryption/decryption to change the tag length between 1 to 16 bytes.

    Own Id: OTP-13483 Aux Id: PR-998

1.5  Crypto 3.6.3

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • Fix bug for aes_ecb block crypto when data is larger than 16 bytes.

    Own Id: OTP-13249

  • Improve portability of ECC tests in Crypto and SSL for "exotic" OpenSSL versions.

    Own Id: OTP-13311

1.6  Crypto 3.6.2

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • Small documentation fixes

    Own Id: OTP-13017

1.7  Crypto 3.6.1

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • Make crypto:ec_curves/0 return empty list if elliptic curve is not supported at all.

    Own Id: OTP-12944

1.8  Crypto 3.6

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • Enhance crypto:generate_key to calculate ECC public keys from private key.

    Own Id: OTP-12394

  • Fix bug in crypto:generate_key for ecdh that could cause VM crash for faulty input.

    Own Id: OTP-12733

Improvements and New Features

  • Use the EVP API for AES-CBC crypto to enables the use of hardware acceleration for AES-CBC crypto on newer Intel CPUs (AES-NI), among other platforms.

    Own Id: OTP-12380

  • Add AES ECB block encryption.

    Own Id: OTP-12403

1.9  Crypto 3.5

Improvements and New Features

  • Extend block_encrypt/decrypt for aes_cfb8 and aes_cfb128 to accept keys of length 128, 192 and 256 bits. Before only 128 bit keys were accepted.

    Own Id: OTP-12467

1.10  Crypto 3.4.2

Improvements and New Features

  • Add configure option --with-ssl-incl=PATH to support OpenSSL installations with headers and libraries at different places.

    Own Id: OTP-12215 Aux Id: seq12700

  • Add configure option --with-ssl-rpath to control which runtime library path to use for dynamic linkage toward OpenSSL.

    Own Id: OTP-12316 Aux Id: seq12753

1.11  Crypto 3.4.1

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • Make crypto verify major version number of OpenSSL header files and runtime library. Loading of crypto will fail if there is a version mismatch.

    Own Id: OTP-12146 Aux Id: seq12700

1.12  Crypto 3.4

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • Fix memory leak in crypto:hmac_init/upgrade/final functions for all data and in crypto:hmac/3/4 for data larger than 20000 bytes. Bug exists since OTP 17.0.

    Own Id: OTP-11953

  • Fix memory leak in crypto for elliptic curve.

    Own Id: OTP-11999

Improvements and New Features

  • Add aes_cfb8 cypher to crypto:block_encrypt and block_decrypt.

    Own Id: OTP-11911

1.13  Crypto 3.3

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • Fix memory leaks and invalid deallocations in mod_pow, mod_exp and generate_key(srp,...) when bad arguments are passed. (Thanks to Florian Zumbiehi)

    Own Id: OTP-11550

  • Correction of the word 'ChipherText' throughout the documentation (Thanks to Andrew Tunnell-Jones)

    Own Id: OTP-11609

  • Fix fatal bug when using a hmac context variable in more than one call to hmac_update or hmac_final. The reuse of hmac contexts has never worked as the underlying OpenSSL implementation does not support it. It is now documented as having undefined behaviour, but it does not crash or corrupt the VM anymore.

    Own Id: OTP-11724

  • Crypto handles out-of-memory with a controlled abort instead of crash/corruption. (Thanks to Florian Zumbiehi)

    Own Id: OTP-11725

  • Application upgrade (appup) files are corrected for the following applications:

    asn1, common_test, compiler, crypto, debugger, dialyzer, edoc, eldap, erl_docgen, et, eunit, gs, hipe, inets, observer, odbc, os_mon, otp_mibs, parsetools, percept, public_key, reltool, runtime_tools, ssh, syntax_tools, test_server, tools, typer, webtool, wx, xmerl

    A new test utility for testing appup files is added to test_server. This is now used by most applications in OTP.

    (Thanks to Tobias Schlager)

    Own Id: OTP-11744

Improvements and New Features

  • By giving --enable-static-{nifs,drivers} to configure it is now possible to statically linking of nifs and drivers to the main Erlang VM binary. At the moment only the asn1 and crypto nifs of the Erlang/OTP nifs and drivers have been prepared to be statically linked. For more details see the Installation Guide in the System documentation.

    Own Id: OTP-11258

  • Add IGE mode for AES cipher in crypto (Thanks to Yura Beznos).

    Own Id: OTP-11522

  • Moved elliptic curve definition from the crypto NIF/OpenSSL into Erlang code, adds the RFC-5639 brainpool curves and makes TLS use them (RFC-7027).

    Thanks to Andreas Schultz

    Own Id: OTP-11578

  • Remove all obsolete application processes from crypto and make it into a pure library application.

    Own Id: OTP-11619

1.14  Crypto 3.2

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • Fix uninitialized pointers in crypto (Thanks to Anthony Ramine)

    Own Id: OTP-11510

1.15  Crypto 3.1

Improvements and New Features

  • Refactor ecdsa cipher to simplify code and improve performance.

    Own Id: OTP-11320

1.16  Crypto 3.0

Improvements and New Features

  • Integrate elliptic curve contribution from Andreas Schultz

    In order to be able to support elliptic curve cipher suites in SSL/TLS, additions to handle elliptic curve infrastructure has been added to public_key and crypto.

    This also has resulted in a rewrite of the crypto API to gain consistency and remove unnecessary overhead. All OTP applications using crypto has been updated to use the new API.

    Impact: Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) offers equivalent security with smaller key sizes than other public key algorithms. Smaller key sizes result in savings for power, memory, bandwidth, and computational cost that make ECC especially attractive for constrained environments.

    Own Id: OTP-11009

  • Fixed a spelling mistake in crypto docs. Thanks to Klaus Trainer

    Own Id: OTP-11058

Known Bugs and Problems

  • Make the crypto functions interruptible by chunking input when it is very large and bumping reductions in the nifs.

    Not yet implemented for block_encrypt|decrypt/4

    Impact: Individual calls to crypto functions may take longer time but over all system performance should improve as crypto calls will not become throughput bottlenecks.

    Own Id: OTP-11142

1.17  Crypto 2.3

Improvements and New Features

  • Enable runtime upgrade of crypto including the OpenSSL library used by crypto.

    Own Id: OTP-10596

  • Improve documentation and tests for hmac functions in crypto. Thanks to Daniel White

    Own Id: OTP-10640

  • Added ripemd160 support to crypto. Thanks to Michael Loftis

    Own Id: OTP-10667

1.18  Crypto 2.2

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • Remove unnecessary dependency to libssl from crypto NIF library. This dependency was introduced by accident in R14B04.

    Own Id: OTP-10064

Improvements and New Features

  • Add crypto and public_key support for the hash functions SHA224, SHA256, SHA384 and SHA512 and also hmac and rsa_sign/verify support using these hash functions. Thanks to Andreas Schultz for making a prototype.

    Own Id: OTP-9908

  • Optimize RSA private key handling in crypto and public_key.

    Own Id: OTP-10065

  • Make crypto:aes_cfb_128_encrypt and crypto:aes_cfb_128_decrypt handle data and cipher with arbitrary length. (Thanks to Stefan Zegenhagen)

    Own Id: OTP-10136

1.19  Crypto 2.1

Improvements and New Features

  • public_key, ssl and crypto now supports PKCS-8

    Own Id: OTP-9312

  • Erlang/OTP can now be built using parallel make if you limit the number of jobs, for instance using 'make -j6' or 'make -j10'. 'make -j' does not work at the moment because of some missing dependencies.

    Own Id: OTP-9451

  • Add DES and Triple DES cipher feedback (CFB) mode functions to crypto. (Thanks to Paul Guyot)

    Own Id: OTP-9640

  • Add sha256, sha384 and sha512 support for crypto:rsa_verify.

    Own Id: OTP-9778

1.20  Crypto 2.0.4

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • crypto:rand_uniform works correctly for negative integers. Fails with badarg exception for invalid ranges (when Hi =< Lo) instead of returning incorrect output.

    Own Id: OTP-9526

  • Fix win32 OpenSSL static linking (Thanks to Dave Cottlehuber)

    Own Id: OTP-9532

1.21  Crypto 2.0.3

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • Various small documentation fixes (Thanks to Bernard Duggan)

    Own Id: OTP-9172

Improvements and New Features

  • New crypto support for streaming of AES CTR and HMAC. (Thanks to Travis Jensen)

    Own Id: OTP-9275

  • Due to standard library DLL mismatches between versions of OpenSSL and Erlang/OTP, OpenSSL is now linked statically to the crypto driver on Windows. This fixes problems starting crypto when running Erlang as a service on all Windows versions.

    Own Id: OTP-9280

1.22  Crypto 2.0.2.2

Improvements and New Features

  • Strengthened random number generation. (Thanks to Geoff Cant)

    Own Id: OTP-9225

1.23  Crypto 2.0.2.1

Improvements and New Features

  • Misc. Updates.

    Own Id: OTP-9132

1.24  Crypto 2.0.2

Improvements and New Features

  • AES CTR encryption support in crypto.

    Own Id: OTP-8752 Aux Id: seq11642

1.25  Crypto 2.0.1

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • Crypto dialyzer type error in md5_mac and sha_mac.

    Own Id: OTP-8718

  • RC4 stream cipher didn't work. This since the new NIF implementation of crypto:rc4_encrypt_with_state/2 introduced in crypto-2.0 didn't return an updated state. (Thanks to Paul Guyot)

    Own Id: OTP-8781

  • A number of memory leaks in the crypto NIF library have been fixed.

    Own Id: OTP-8810

Improvements and New Features

  • Added erlang:system_info(build_type) which makes it easier to chose drivers, NIF libraries, etc based on build type of the runtime system.

    The NIF library for crypto can now be built for valgrind and/or debug as separate NIF libraries that will be automatically loaded if the runtime system has been built with a matching build type.

    Own Id: OTP-8760

1.26  Crypto 2.0

Improvements and New Features

  • crypto application changed to use NIFs instead of driver.

    Own Id: OTP-8333

  • des_ecb_encrypt/2 and des_ecb_decrypt/2 has been added to the crypto module. The crypto:md4/1 function has been documented.

    Own Id: OTP-8551

  • The undocumented, unsupport, and deprecated function lists:flat_length/1 has been removed.

    Own Id: OTP-8584

  • New variants of crypto:dss_sign and crypto:dss_verify with an extra argument to control how the digest is calculated.

    Own Id: OTP-8700

1.27  Crypto 1.6.4

Improvements and New Features

  • Cross compilation improvements and other build system improvements.

    Most notable:

    • Lots of cross compilation improvements. The old cross compilation support was more or less non-existing as well as broken. Please, note that the cross compilation support should still be considered as experimental. Also note that old cross compilation configurations cannot be used without modifications. For more information on cross compiling Erlang/OTP see the $ERL_TOP/INSTALL-CROSS.md file.
    • Support for staged install using DESTDIR. The old broken INSTALL_PREFIX has also been fixed. For more information see the $ERL_TOP/INSTALL.md file.
    • Documentation of the release target of the top Makefile. For more information see the $ERL_TOP/INSTALL.md file.
    • make install now by default creates relative symbolic links instead of absolute ones. For more information see the $ERL_TOP/INSTALL.md file.
    • $ERL_TOP/configure --help=recursive now works and prints help for all applications with configure scripts.
    • Doing make install, or make release directly after make all no longer triggers miscellaneous rebuilds.
    • Existing bootstrap system is now used when doing make install, or make release without a preceding make all.
    • The crypto and ssl applications use the same runtime library path when dynamically linking against libssl.so and libcrypto.so. The runtime library search path has also been extended.
    • The configure scripts of erl_interface and odbc now search for thread libraries and thread library quirks the same way as ERTS do.
    • The configure script of the odbc application now also looks for odbc libraries in lib64 and lib/64 directories when building on a 64-bit system.
    • The config.h.in file in the erl_interface application is now automatically generated in instead of statically updated which reduces the risk of configure tests without any effect.

    (Thanks to Henrik Riomar for suggestions and testing)

    (Thanks to Winston Smith for the AVR32-Linux cross configuration and testing)

    *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY ***

    Own Id: OTP-8323

  • The crypto module now supports Blowfish in ECB, CBC and OFB modes. (Thanks to Paul Oliver.)

    Own Id: OTP-8331

  • The documentation is now possible to build in an open source environment after a number of bugs are fixed and some features are added in the documentation build process.

    - The arity calculation is updated.

    - The module prefix used in the function names for bif's are removed in the generated links so the links will look like "http://www.erlang.org/doc/man/erlang.html#append_element-2" instead of "http://www.erlang.org/doc/man/erlang.html#erlang:append_element-2".

    - Enhanced the menu positioning in the html documentation when a new page is loaded.

    - A number of corrections in the generation of man pages (thanks to Sergei Golovan)

    - The legal notice is taken from the xml book file so OTP's build process can be used for non OTP applications.

    Own Id: OTP-8343

1.28  Crypto 1.6.3

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • Suppressed false valgrind errors caused by libcrypto using uninitialized data as entropy.

    Own Id: OTP-8200

Improvements and New Features

  • The documentation is now built with open source tools (xsltproc and fop) that exists on most platforms. One visible change is that the frames are removed.

    Own Id: OTP-8201

  • When the crypto application failed to load the OpenSSL/LibEAY shared object, error indication was sparse. Now a more specific error message is sent to the error logger.

    Own Id: OTP-8281

1.29  Crypto 1.6.2

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • Fixed emulator crash caused by crypto using an old openssl version that did not cope with large file descriptors.

    Own Id: OTP-8261 Aux Id: seq11434

1.30  Crypto 1.6.1

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • Makefile.in has been updated to use the LDFLAGS environment variable (if set). (Thanks to Davide Pesavento.)

    Own Id: OTP-8157

Improvements and New Features

  • Support for Blowfish cfb64 added to crypto.

    Own Id: OTP-8096

  • New function crypto:aes_cbc_ivec

    Own Id: OTP-8141

1.31  Crypto 1.6

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • The dh_compute_key sometimes returned a SharedSecret of incorrect size.

    Own Id: OTP-7674

Improvements and New Features

  • Optimization for drivers by creating small binaries direct on process heap.

    Own Id: OTP-7762

1.32  Crypto 1.5.3

Improvements and New Features

  • Added new functions: dss_verify/3, rsa_verify/3, rsa_verify/4, dss_sign/2, rsa_sign/2, rsa_sign/3, rsa_public_encrypt, rsa_private_decrypt/3, rsa_private_encrypt/3, rsa_public_decrypt/3, dh_generate_key/1, dh_generate_key/2, dh_compute_key/3.

    Own Id: OTP-7545

1.33  Crypto 1.5.2.1

Improvements and New Features

  • Minor performance optimization.

    Own Id: OTP-7521

1.34  Crypto 1.5.2

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • ./configure has been improved to find 64-bit OpenSSL libraries.

    Own Id: OTP-7270

Improvements and New Features

  • crypto and zlib drivers improved to allow concurent smp access.

    Own Id: OTP-7262

1.35  Crypto 1.5.1.1

Improvements and New Features

  • The linked in driver for the crypto application is now linked statically against the OpenSSL libraries, to avoid installation and runtime problems in connection to the OpenSSL library locations.

    Own Id: OTP-6680

  • Minor Makefile changes.

    Own Id: OTP-6689

1.36  Crypto 1.5

Improvements and New Features

  • It is now explicitly checked at start-up that the crypto driver is properly loaded (Thanks to Claes Wikstrom).

    Own Id: OTP-6109

1.37  Crypto 1.4

Improvements and New Features

  • The previously undocumented and UNSUPPORTED ssh application has been updated and documented. This release of the ssh application is still considered to be a beta release and (if necessary) there could still be changes in its API before it reaches 1.0.

    Also, more cryptographic algorithms have been added to the crypto application.

    *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY ***

    Own Id: OTP-5631

1.38  Crypto 1.3

Improvements and New Features

  • Added support for RFC 3826 - The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) Cipher Algorithm in the SNMP User-based Security Model.
    Martin Björklund

1.39  Crypto 1.2.3

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • Linked in drivers in the crypto, and asn1 applications are now compiled with the -D_THREAD_SAFE and -D_REENTRANT switches on unix when the emulator has thread support enabled.

    Linked in drivers on MacOSX are not compiled with the undocumented -lbundle1.o switch anymore. Thanks to Sean Hinde who sent us a patch.

    Linked in driver in crypto, and port programs in ssl, now compiles on OSF1.

    Minor makefile improvements in runtime_tools.

    Own Id: OTP-5346

1.40  Crypto 1.2.2

Improvements and New Features

  • Corrected error handling. If the port to the driver that crypto uses is unexpectedly closed (which should not happen during normal operation of crypto), crypto will terminate immediately (rather than crashing the next time crypto is used). Also corrected build problems on Mac OS X.

    Own Id: OTP-5279

1.41  Crypto 1.2.1

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • It was not possible in R9 to relink the crypto driver. The object file was missing as well as an example makefile. The crypto driver object file is now released with the application (installed in priv/obj). An example makefile has also been added to the priv/obj directory. The makefile serves as an example of how to relink the driver on Unix (crypto_drv.so) or Windows (crypto_drv.dll).

    Own Id: OTP-4828 Aux Id: seq8193

1.42  Crypto 1.2

Improvements and New Features

  • Previous versions of Crypto where delivered with statically linked binaries based on SSLeay. That is not longer the case. The current version of Crypto requires dynamically linked OpenSSL libraries that the user has to install. The library needed is libcrypto.so (Unix) or libeay32.[lib|dll] (Win32). For further details see the crypto(6) application manual page.

  • This version of Crypto uses the new DES interface of OpenSSL 0.9.7, which is not backward compatible with earlier versions of OpenSSL.

  • The functions des_ede3_cbc_encrypt/5 and des_ede3_cbc_decrypt/5 have been renamed to des3_cbc_encrypt/5 and des3_cbc_decrypt/5, respectively. The old functions have been retained (they are deprecated and not listed in the crypto(3) manual page).

Reported Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • The start of crypto failed on Windows, due to erroneous addition of a DES3 algorithm.

    Own Id: OTP-4684
    Aux Id: seq7864

1.43  Crypto 1.1.3

Reported Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • To obtain backward compatibility with the old SSLeay package, and with earlier versions of OpenSSL, the macro OPENSSL_DES_LIBDES_COMPATIBILITY has been added to crypto_drv.c. This is of importance only for the open source version of Crypto.

1.44  Crypto 1.1.2

Reported Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • In the manual page crypto(3) the function names md5_finish and sha_finish have been changed to md5_final and sha_final to correctly document the implementation.

    Own Id: OTP-3409

1.45  Crypto 1.1.1

Code replacement in runtime is supported. Upgrade can be done from from version 1.1 and downgrade to version 1.1.

Improvements and New Features

  • The driver part of the Crypto application has been updated to use the erl_driver header file. Version 1.1.1 requires emulator version 4.9.1 or later.

1.46  Crypto 1.1

Reported Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

  • On Windows the crypto_drv was incorrectly linked to static run-time libraries instead of dynamic ones.

    Own Id: OTP-3240

1.47  Crypto 1.0

New application.