Renames fiat backend directory to fiat_u64 and does the additional plumbing required to make fiat_{u32, u64}_backend equal alternatives.
Adds a few comments.
This implementation:
- is agnostic on the hash used to pick a field element, even though SHA512 is commonly used,
- follows https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-irtf-cfrg-hash-to-curve-10.html closely
- tests the outputs of the function using libsignal's implementation.
`zeroize` is WASM-friendly as it has no dependencies on C compilers.
Instead uses Rust's own volatile write semantics and compiler fences to
ensure zeroization is not elided by the compiler.
This was more useful at the time when we were determining, e.g., optimal lookup
table sizes and could regenerate them more easily, but it came at a massive
complexity cost. It also meant that we were unable to implement backend
autoselection. This commit removes the `build.rs` entirely. In the future, a
different `build.rs` could be added that auto-selects a backend, but it seems
like the current default-u64 setup has been working fine.
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.
This doesn't (yet) give any speedup over the non-precomputed multiscalar
multiplication, and it's not clear that it's a good idea to commit to
supporting it in the future. Removing it means that it's not committed-to as
part of the public API, but the source is still there in the tree if we want to
revisit it later.
This begins to attempt to restructure the source tree so that the common parts
are common and the different parts are different.
The backend is now split into two parts:
- serial (containing the implementation using serial formulas and mixed-model arithmetic).
- vector (containing the implementation using parallel formulas and single-model arithmetic).
The serial scalar_mul tree is now under backend::serial::scalar_mul.
The avx2 scalar_mul tree is now under backend::avx2::scalar_mul.
