Libgcrypt 1.7 Adds New Algorithms, Performance Improvements

Werner Koch announced the release today of libgcrypt 1.7, a major update to this general cryptographic library.

Libgcrypt 1.7 adds a nnumber of new hash algorithms, ChaCha20 stream cipher support, various other new algorithms/modes and also some new curves for ECC.

Getting us excited about libgcrypt 1.7 are reported performance improvements including an Assembler-optimized implementations of various functions for x86 and ARM, improved AES using SSSE3, support for using AVX/BMI for SHA1 and SHA256 on x86, and various other speed-up improvements to this crypto code.

More details on libgcrypt 1.7.0 can be found via the release announcement.