TMS Cryptography Pack version 1.3

Dear users, evaluators and forum readers,

TMS CP v1.3 has been released with several enhancements following comments by users and evaluators.

Prior to presenting these changes let me give you some backgroung on TMS CP. The library was initially designed for internal use in various applications and developed with C++ Builder. Because it contains several recent algorithms that are not supported in older libraries, we thought it would beneficial to the Delphi community to get a Delphi interface to the C++ code, although it is sometimes tricky to interface Pascal with C++ object files.

From day one, we have decided to only support "recent" and "secure" algorithms and that is why TMS CP does not contain DES, 3DES, SHA1 or MD5, to name a few. We understand that this may be an issue for those of you willing to comply with existing standards but we strongly recommend against using these "deprecated" algorithms.

Back to the enhancements of version 1.3.
One user noticed that SHA3 was quite slow for huge files and we rewrote our primitive entirely in this new release. The improvement is very significant on our different platforms and you should also notice it.

While improving SHA3, we also noticed that SHA2 and, for completely different reasons, AES could be made faster in some cases. Version 1.3 contains modified versions of these algorithms that are faster for huge files (for instance, we use more tables in the AES beyond a threshold). SPECK has also been improved for some block/key sizes combinations.

We also fixed an issue with Android due a configuration issue on our side.

We received several other comments that will be addressed in versions 1.4 and 2.0 as some extra development work is required.

We intend to populate the library with new algorithms such as Argon2 for password hashing and we welcome requests for new features as long as they are for secure algorithms or functions facilitating compliance to, or use of, standards.

iOS support is in our roadmap but won't be there until 2.0 for practical reasons.

Feedback is indeed welcome.

bernard