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bpo-40791: Make compare_digest more constant-time. (pythonGH-20444)
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* bpo-40791: Make compare_digest more constant-time.

The existing volatile `left`/`right` pointers guarantee that the reads will all occur, but does not guarantee that they will be _used_. So a compiler can still short-circuit the loop, saving e.g. the overhead of doing the xors and especially the overhead of the data dependency between `result` and the reads. That would change performance depending on where the first unequal byte occurs. This change removes that optimization.

(This is change #1 from https://bugs.python.org/issue40791 .)
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ssbr committed Nov 21, 2020
1 parent aa3a352 commit 3172936
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Add ``volatile`` to the accumulator variable in ``hmac.compare_digest``, making constant-time-defeating optimizations less likely.
2 changes: 1 addition & 1 deletion Modules/_operator.c
Expand Up @@ -749,7 +749,7 @@ _tscmp(const unsigned char *a, const unsigned char *b,
volatile const unsigned char *left;
volatile const unsigned char *right;
Py_ssize_t i;
unsigned char result;
volatile unsigned char result;

/* loop count depends on length of b */
length = len_b;
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