Subject: bug#47222: Serious bug in Nettle's ecdsa_verify

From: Leo Famulari <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 Mar 2021 14:16:50 -0400

On Thu, Mar 25, 2021 at 05:21:40PM +0100, Niels Möller wrote:
> Changes to gostdsa and ed448 will not apply, since those curves didn't
> exist in nettle-3.5. Changes to ed25519 might not apply cleanly, due to
> refactoring when adding ed448.

Okay.

> > I’m asking because in Guix, the easiest way for us to deploy the fixes
> > on the ‘master’ branch would be by “grafting” a new Nettle variant
> > ABI-compatible with 3.5.1, which is the one packages currently depend on.
> 
> I still recommend upgrading to the latest version. There were an abi
> break in 3.6 (so you'd need to recompile lots of guix packages), but no
> incompatible changes to the (source level) api.

Unfortunately, non-ABI compatible upgrades of nettle cannot be done
quickly in Guix. As you point out, we'd have to recompile over >10000
packages, and then we'd have to fix any breakage that might occur from
the upgrade.

We will have to try to cherry-pick the bug fix patches.