Libgcrypt 1.12 has been released, a fundamental library for cryptography used by GnuPG and a wide range of applications, including email clients and file encryption tools.

Key Features

The new version introduces significant optimizations for AMD Zen 5 CPUs, leveraging VAES and AVX-512 instructions to accelerate AES encryption operations. Preliminary tests indicate a doubling of performance in certain scenarios.

Implications for Security and Performance

Hardware acceleration of AES encryption is crucial to ensure both the security and speed of communications and data storage. The adoption of VAES and AVX-512 reduces the load on the CPU, freeing up resources for other activities and improving energy efficiency. For those evaluating on-premise deployments, there are trade-offs between performance, costs, and security requirements to consider carefully.

Adoption and Compatibility

Libgcrypt is a widely used library in open source and beyond. Upgrading to version 1.12 allows you to benefit from the new hardware optimizations, provided you use AMD Zen 5 or later CPUs that support VAES and AVX-512 instructions.