News

THEMIS 0.10.0 RELEASE We couldn’t hold out till St. Valentine’s Day, so we’re releasing the love and all the hard work put into the new version of Themis today. Themis 0.10.0 is out and there is no turning back as this release introduces breaking changes. If you are using Themis on x64 systems, consider upgrading every Themis library/wrapper you were using to 0.10.0. Incompatibility issues may arise between previous Themis versions and 0.

Stats This was an eventful year for Cossack Labs! According to our GitHub stats, in 2017 we: made 1200 commits into master branches; merged 260 PRs; accumulated 444 new stars. Products and releases We picked a weird, but hopefully auspicious habit of releasing stuff on holidays or 13th days of the month (preferably Fridays :) or Mercury retrograde periods: Acra Acra’s public release took place on the 8th of March.

Season’s greetings and all kinds of good things in the New Year! – With 🔒 from Cossack Labs!

THEMIS 0.9.6 RELEASE One release a week is good, two releases is better still. After releasing Hermes-core 0.5.1 PoC yesterday, following the good tradition of releasing on the 13th day of the month, we’re releasing Themis 0.9.6 today. The main feature of this release is adding support for OpenSSL 1.1. The rest of the update details are as follows: Docs: Significant update of the Contributing section in Wiki. Infrastructure: Removed support for Ubuntu Precise.

Hermes by Cossack Labs Cossack Labs release a proof of concept version of Hermes — a framework for cryptographically assured access control and data security. A PoC reference implementation of Hermes is Hermes-core 0.5.1, the source code and accompanying documentation of which become available on December 13, 2017. What is Hermes Hermes is a cryptography-based method of providing protected data storage and sharing that allows enforcing cryptographically checked CRUD permissions to data blocks and doesn't let server that's running Hermes do anything worse than DoS.

THEMIS 0.9.5 RELEASE Strategic planning, respect for traditions, and a consultation with our in-house astrologer led to an imminent release of Themis 0.9.5 on Wednesday 13, the 256th day of the year a.k.a. the International Developer’s Day. The update focuses on crystallizing conveniences, niceties and compatibility fixes that have been around for some time now. Here is the list of improvements: Infrastructure: You can now download pre-built Themis packages from our package server.

Introducing Acra If you are concerned about data security, this means confronting a threat landscape that requires vigilance and defence against a wide range of attacks. One of the prime targets for attack continues to be sensitive data that is stored in backend database storage. From simple discovery of unsecured databases, through classic SQL injection techniques, to compromised infrastructure that allows wholesale copying of database content, attacks focus on data assets with increasing precision.

Bright and full of new 2016 year insensibly came to an end. Writing good software is hard: absorbed in developing our main products, closed a testing round of Acra (all hail the braves who dedicated an immense amount of time giving us feedback), we’ve spent most of the year undercover. Now that we’ve shown first cues to the open public, revelatory moments are closer than ever. This year we’ve put a lot of effort into helping Themis users understand how to better use Themis and how to build stronger apps:

Intro Themis provides several methods for encrypting data at rest - Secure Cell, Secure Message. Where do people store data? In files and in databases. Sometimes, you want to manipulate cryptographic data on the database side, this is where Themis plugins come handy. Even though generally it's a questionable practice, but sometimes you need to encrypt/decrypt data on the database side. Moreover, there are some security designs where you have to:

Why feel cold when happiness and laughter of your colleagues might make any evening warm and happy. Yesterday our team gathered to  release Themis 0.9.4, and so did we.  Take a look at the updates: BoringSSL support on Android and Linux Fixed some leaks and code styling problems (thanks to @bryongloden) Memory management updates for stability in languages, which rely on GC Fix Themis build errors under certain conditions Swift3 support + numerous enhancements from @valeriyvan GoThemis: fixed rare behavior in Secure Session wrapper