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authorJack Lloyd <[email protected]>2017-10-20 18:03:27 -0400
committerJack Lloyd <[email protected]>2017-10-20 18:03:27 -0400
commitd34d1edc22e947b8b4a95ee86d268592d03675a8 (patch)
treef1447db122eafeeecf216744019b6c4ea28ed4c4 /doc/manual/side_channels.rst
parent0b246a836cc106695516d532412b79068a913bc2 (diff)
Update side channel notes
Diffstat (limited to 'doc/manual/side_channels.rst')
-rw-r--r--doc/manual/side_channels.rst13
1 files changed, 5 insertions, 8 deletions
diff --git a/doc/manual/side_channels.rst b/doc/manual/side_channels.rst
index f7b7cdd6d..5656001e4 100644
--- a/doc/manual/side_channels.rst
+++ b/doc/manual/side_channels.rst
@@ -104,12 +104,9 @@ See eme_oaep.cpp.
Modular Exponentiation
------------------------
-Modular exponentiation uses a fixed window algorithm with Montgomery representation.
-In the current code, information about the exponent is leaked through the
-sequence of memory indexes; we currently rely on randomized blinding at higher
-levels of the cryptographic stack to hide this. A future project would be to
-change this to use either Montgomery ladder or use a side channel silent table
-lookup. See powm_mnt.cpp.
+Modular exponentiation uses a fixed window algorithm with Montgomery
+representation. A side channel silent table lookup is used to access the
+precomputed powers. See powm_mnt.cpp.
The Karatsuba multiplication algorithm has some conditional branches that
probably expose information through the branch predictor, but probably? does not
@@ -239,8 +236,8 @@ const time 8x bitsliced AES could be integrated fairly easily.
GCM
---------------------
-On x86 platforms which support the clmul instruction, GCM support is fast and
-constant time.
+On platforms that support a carryless multiply instruction (recent x86 and ARM),
+GCM is fast and constant time.
On all other platforms, GCM is slow and constant time. It uses a simple bit at
at time loop. It would be much faster using a table lookup, but we wish to avoid