Section: Application Domains

Key Software Tools

The vast majority of our work is eventually realized as software. We can roughly categorize it in two groups. Some of our software covers truly fundamental objects, such as the GNU MPFR, GNU MPC, GF2X, or MPFQ packages. To their respective extent, these software packages are meant to be included or used in broader projects. For this reason, it is important that the license chosen for this software allows proper reuse, and we favor licenses such as the LGPL, which is not restrictive. We can measure the impact of this software by the way it is used in e.g., the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), in Victor Shoup's Number Theory Library (NTL), or in the Sage computer algebra system. The availability of these software packages in most Linux distributions is also a good measure for the impact of our work.

We also develop more specialized software. Our flagship software package is Cado-NFS, and we also develop some others with various levels of maturity, such as GMP-ECM, CMH, or Belenios, aiming at quite diverse targets. Within the lifespan of the CARAMBA project, we expect more software packages of this kind to be developed, specialized towards tasks relevant to our research targets: important mathematical structures attached to genus 2 curves, generation of cryptographically secure curves, or tools for attacking cryptographically hard problems. Such software both illustrates our algorithms, and provides a base on which further research work can be established. Because of the very nature of these specialized software packages as research topics in their own right, needing both to borrow material from other projects, and being possible source of inspiring material for others, it is again important that these be developed in a free and open-source development model.