News Archive 3

The largest changes involve pairing initialization and pairing parameters.

For pairing initialization, supply a buffer containing pairing parameters instead of a FILE * stream. For example, rather than:

write something like:

For file reads, personally I like to use mmap() which suits pairing_init_set_buf().

The pbc_param_t data type for pairing parameters replaces a_param_t, …, g_param_t. Having the same data type for all pairing parameter types simplifies the library, though some functions had to be changed slightly.

At last, one can initialize a pairing_t from a pbc_param_t:

Minor differences:

I trimmed the API. The file stream operations are gone. I removed the fetch_ops_t and tracker_t types: the standard C library already provides routines for reading from disk to memory.

I refactored to avoid exposing symtab_t and darray_t, and undocumented routines such as poly_alloc(). I mostly preserved the headers that define these functions, but they are no longer included by pbc.h.

I replaced the CMake files with simple.make, which I use during development, though I test the autotools build before release.

To reduce symbol pollution, all official functions and variables of the PBC now start with pbc_, field_, element_ or pairing_. Other names mostly have hidden visibility in a shared library. Watch out for renamed functions.

I added a convenience wrapper element_pp_pow_zn(), and cleaned up a few source files.

Stefan Weber fixed a bug in Yulian Kalev’s random number generator code for Windows.

Yulian Kalev contributed a random number generator for Windows, using the Microsoft Crypto API.

A minor bugfix, and an API change for curve finding functions.