News Archive 9

See the mailing list press release or the NEWS file for details. One big change is that the signature and broadcast encryption code have been spun off into new libraries. Together with new debugging features and file renaming (and the usual slew of minor fixes and cleanups), these constitute substantial modifications which justifies incrementing the minor version number.

The new libraries have their own webpages:

PBC_sig: http://crypto.stanford.edu/pbc/sig/

PBC_bce: http://crypto.stanford.edu/pbc/bce/

but share the same mailing list. They are in a highly immature state.

I’m following the cumbersome but informative satellite library naming convention of the SDL library. (Some SDL-based libraries have names such as SDL_Image or SDL_net.)

The roles of the three different places to get news on the library are becoming clearer. I changed the NEWS file to look more like the one in GMP and less like the ChangeLog. The latter is now the only place containing a play-by-play analysis.

One drawback of this new regimen is that I only started maintaining the ChangeLog from around version 0.3.0. Before that, details of changes can only be found an old verson of the NEWS file, though I have posted a webpage summarizing early PBC history.

I now use Valgrind to find memory leaks, and I have jettisoned my own clumsy kludgy leak detection code.

Various bugfixes. The most serious one was reported by Paul Miller: element_from_hash() was not returning the same point each time.

pbc.h now includes more header files so all the functions documented in the manual can be used without generating warnings (or learning about these extra header files).

I also added the pbc_mpz_randomb() function and a couple of test programs use this now.

Minor fixes: applied John Bethencourt’s patch to address bugs that arose on 64-bit machines, added some comments from Dmitry Kosolapov, resolved a naming conflict that should solve compilation problems in some cases.

The official PBC library URL is now

which means PBC is hosted by a department webserver rather than my personal office machine. However, the git repository still lives on my system.

I’ll try to keep the old URLs working for a while.