The NAF computation can generate a 1 in the last digit (only) when s = 2^255-1,
so someone who manually constructed the value s = 2^255-1 and fed it into a NAF-using
computation could generate an incorrect result. Some version of this bug has
been present from the beginning of the library, but it has no security content,
because the NAF computations are not applied to secret data, and the error
occurs only on one value which is not constructed by any client caller.
When using Scalar::from_bits to manually create unreduced Scalars (e.g.,
X/Ed25519 keys with specified bit patterns), it's possible to construct Scalar
values that range up to 2^255-1. These shouldn't ever end up in a vartime
multiscalar mul call anyways, because it doesn't handle secret data, but it is
technically allowed by the type system and should be handled. When w=8, these
can generate terminal carries that can't be folded into the last digit, but
this can be handled by folding them into an extra digit instead.
This fixes a bug in the Pippenger implementation reported by Fernando Krell and
diagnosed by Oleg Andreev. The problem is that at the largest problem sizes
(using w=8), the signed digits fill the value range of an i8, and so doing
computation on them to calculate the bucket index can hit an overflow.
This was not caught in CI because the test suite didn't check all problem
sizes; tests for these sizes which expose this bug were added in the previous
commit.
This saves 4 point doublings by unwrapping the first loop iteration,
as well as 63 field multiplications (one per iteration) by managing
curve model choice explicitly.
* ADD new "batch" feature for feature-gating ed25519 batch verification; off by
default. The "batch" feature is the only thing which depends on all of the
`rand` crate, since it requires the functionality of `rand::thread_rng()`.
Without batch verification, the rest of ed25519-dalek only depends on
`rand_os` and `rand_core`.
