(This article first appeared on XML.com.)

A few weeks after release 2.2.1 of the free software XML parsing library Expat, version 2.2.2 now improves on few rough edges (mostly related to compilation) but also fixes security issues.

Windows binaries compiled with _UNICODE now use proper entropy for seeding the SipHash algorithm. On Unix-like platforms, accidentally missing out on high quality entropy sources is now prevented from going unnoticed: It would happen when some other build system than the configure script was used, e.g. the shipped CMake one or when the source code was copied into some parent project's build system without paying attention to the new compile flags (that the configure script would auto-detect for you). After some struggle with a decision about C99, Expat requires a C99 compiler now; 18 years after its definition, that's a defendable move. The uint64_t type and ULL integer literals (unsigned long long) for SipHash made us move.

Expat would like to thank the community for the bug reports and patches that went into Expat 2.2.2. If you maintain a bundled copy of Expat somewhere, please make sure it gets updated.

Sebastian Pipping for the Expat development team