Migration guide from older MLA versions

This guide can help you upgrade code through breaking changes from one MLA version to the next. For a detailed list of all changes, see the CHANGELOG.

from 1.* to 2.0.0

Deprecation of MLA 1

• MLA 2 is now the default and is incompatible with MLA 1.
• MLA 1 enters low maintenance mode (no new features, only critical bug fixes).

Generate new keys

MLA 2 introduces a new archive format and new cryptography. You must generate new keys:

mlar keygen sender
mlar keygen receiver

Note: if you don’t need signatures for mlar archive creation, specify only the layers you want (e.g. -l encrypt -l compress) and omit the -l sign otherwise it will be present by default. For reading with mlar, If you understand the associated risks, you can skip signature verification using the --skip-signature-verification flag.

Upgrade your archives

mlar-upgrader is a CLI utility for upgrading MLA archives from version 1 to version 2. It reads a legacy MLA v1 archive, optionally decrypts it using provided private keys, and writes a new MLA v2 archive, optionally re-encrypting it with specified MLA v2 public keys.

Full documentation: mlar-upgrader usage.

mlar utility

mlar repair command got renamed to mlar clean-truncated. It also got fixed regarding to issue #226.

API

MLA 2 introduces signifiant API changes for archive creation, encryption and signature handling, see quick API usage.

Bindings

C/C++

MLA 2 introduces signifiant API changes for archive creation, encryption and signature handling. Updated examples to read and write an MLA on Linux and Windows can be found here.

Full documentation: MLA’s C/C++ API.

Python

MLA 2 introduces one major change in the Python bindings: MLAFile split: this class got split into MLAReader and MLAWriter, see usage example.

Also, MLA 2 now includes stub files (.pyi) for better IDE support (type checking, autocompletion).