TForge 0.68 is released.
TForge 0.68 is a maintenance release which fixes memory leak in THMAC implementation, fixes endianness issue for non-crypto hash functions such as CRC32 and adds minor improvements to ByteArray type.
Previous releases were returning message digest values for non-crypto hash functions in reversed byte order; the reasoning behind this design was that such function are returning integer values, and on little-endian CPU the byte order is reversed; this is not an issue anymore.
Since version 0.68 all hash functions return message digests in big-endian format, so there is no need to reverse byte order for non-crypto functions. This design is more consistent and also follows “least surprise” rule. When a non-crypto message digest is converted to integer type on a little-endian CPU the byte order is reversed under the hood.
TForge also contains alternative simpler and faster implementations of non-crypto functions in tfUtils.pas unit (TCRC32 and TJenkins1 types) which return message digests as an integer type and thus have no endianness dilemma at all.
Whenever a ByteArray method treats an instance data as an integer, it now assumes big-endian format. The examples are 2 new methods added in ver 0.68 – ByteArray.Incr and ByteArray.Decr. As names suggest the first method increments an instance data, the second decrements; both assumes that the data is an unsigned integer in big-endian format.
ByteArray.Incr method is useful for implementing some crypto primitives such as CTR mode of operation for block ciphers.
Happy New Year!
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