MaraDNS 1.3.03 released; hash function tarball updated

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Rani Assaf found a memory leak in MaraDNS' code that my SQA setup didn't catch. I have revised my SQA process to catch this particular leak, and have plugged the leak.

In addition, since Roy asked me to compile the Win32 port of MaraDNS with the "-pipe" switch to speed things up, I made the appropriate change to the Win32 makefile. Alas, "-pipe" seems to, if anything, slightly slow down the compiling of MaraDNS in win32.

There are a number of other bugfixes and enhancments which are in the post-1.3.02 development branch, such as it now being possible to have "." by itself being a hostname. Read earlier snapshop announcments for details.

MaraDNS 1.3.03 is available here:

MaraDNS 1.3.03

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For a few years now, I have had a tarball with various cryptographic hash algorithms available. This tarball hasn't been updated since 2001. Now, with the NIST starting to work on getting a new hash function out there, there have been some new hash primitives developed, including RadioGatun and LASH. In addition, I have found a couple of interesting hash functions which never got mainstream interest: Michael Johnson created a 256-bit hash function called Sapsum a few years ago, and last year a suite of encrpytion primitives, including a hash function, is included with the FastFlex suite.

This in mind, I have finally updated the suite of hash functions, removing some broken algorithms (MD4, MD5, the CRC and UNIX sums, etc.), and adding some new algorithms. The revised suite is available here:

sums-20070214.tar.bz2

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Happy Valentine's day everyone!

New MaraDNS snapshots; Marahash 1.1 released

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I have released two new MaraDNS snapshots today; a new snap for both the stable and development branches of MaraDNS. The development snapshot of MaraDNS has the most significant improvments: I have updated the CSV2 parser to allow TXT records with multiple fields to be in the more BIND-compatible 'field 1' 'field 2' format in addition to the 'field 1';'field 2' format MaraDNS 1.2 zone files use. This only works if the ~ is used to separate records, and will make finishing up the bind zone file to csv2 zone file conversion script easier.

In the stable snapshot, I have added the patch file that fixes the bug where a host name can not be a '.' by itself (the root DNS node). I will include this patch with the next stable release of MaraDNS, but will not apply this patch until I am sure this bugfix doesn't introduce any new bugs. I do not want to repeat the mistake I made with the 1.0.33/1.1.50 releases of MaraDNS, where a bug fix resulted in other bugs being created.

The workaround in MaraDNS 1.2 is to use a '%' in a zone file for the root node (csv2["."]) to get a DNS root node.

In both snapshots, the manpage reference PDF file has been updated. I finally got ghostscript 8.54 working on my system. Compiling and installing from the ghostscript 8.54 source was not enough; I also had to copy all of the fonts ghostscript wants from /usr/share/fonts/default/Type1/ and /usr/share/fonts/default/ghostscript/ in to the directory /usr/local/share/ghostscript/8.54/lib.

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For a few years now, there has been a program hidden in tools/misc called Marahash. This is a program that uses the MaraDNS random number generator (an AES variant, as it turns out) as a compression function to make a 128-bit cryptographic hash. I recently discovered that the 1.2 security updates to MaraDNS' random number generator made the hash too slow to be usable. Since this hash is something useful to have, I have taken the Marahash code, replaced the MaraRNG with the older pre-1.2 MaraRNG core (the security improvments are not needed when using this core as a hash compression function), and made some usability improvments.

This resulted in Marahash. I then made some usability improvments to Marahash. Instead of being able to hash just a single file, Marahash now takes a list of files and directories as command line arguments. If a given command line argument is a directory, Marahash will recursively find all files in the directory and all sub-directories, and output their hashes. The output format for Marahash is now the hash followed by the filename. One can make a hash of all files in the current directory and all subdirectories with this command:

marahash . > MARASUMS

This is useful for making a file that can be used to verify file integrity on burned CDs and DVDs.

Marahash is not the fastest hash: it is about six times slower than SHA-1 and 10 times slower than MD5. It also has a digest size of only 128 bits. Despite these limitations, it is still a useful hash to have around.

I have both Linux/Unix source code and Windows binaries for Marahash available here:

marahash-1.1.tar.bz2 Sig (Linux/Unix source)
marahash-1-1-win32.zip Sig(Windows 32bit binary)