Removal of the FIPS DLL at next Crypto++ release

[Jeffrey Walton]

Hi Everyone,

I want to move forward with the removal of the FIPS DLL from the Visual Studio project.

There's several reasons to remove the FIPS DLL. The reasons include (1) Crypto++ is on the Historical Validation LIst, so it is no longer approved, (2) it only covered Windows 2000, Windows XP and Crypto++ 5.3 (iirc), and (3) it confuses users and it is hard to use correctly.

We deprecated the FIPS DLL back in 2018 with the release of Crypto++ 8.0.  I think 3 years is enough time. Also see https://cryptopp.com/release800.html

The removal will take the current Visual Studio project files (with the FIPS DLL), and move them to vs2010.zip. Then, will will remove the two projects cryptdll and dlltest. There will be a copy of the project with the FIPS DLL for those who want to extract it from the zip. We will also remove fips140.cpp and fipstest.cpp (and associated header files).

Since the DLL removal is a big change, we will bump to Crypto++ 9.0.

For those who want/need Crypto++ in a DLL, they can (1) switch to static lib linking, or (2) create a Wrapper DLL. We have instructions for a wrapper DLL at https://www.cryptopp.com/wiki/Wrapper_DLL .

Are there any objections to the removal?

Jeff

[Andrew Marlow]

Sounds good to me, in fact I think it is overdue. Good to hear the plan.