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Commit c86f2054 authored by Geoff Thorpe's avatar Geoff Thorpe
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Adjust various bignum functions to use BN_CTX for variables instead of

locally initialising their own.

NB: I've removed the "BN_clear_free()" loops for the exit-paths in some of
these functions, and that may be a major part of the performance
improvements we're seeing. The "free" part can be removed because we're
using BN_CTX. The "clear" part OTOH can be removed because BN_CTX
destruction automatically performs this task, so performing it inside
functions that may be called repeatedly is wasteful. This is currently safe
within openssl due to the fact that BN_CTX objects are never created for
longer than a single high-level operation. However, that is only because
there's currently no mechanism in openssl for thread-local storage. Beyond
that, this might be an issue for applications using the bignum API directly
and caching their own BN_CTX objects. The solution is to introduce a flag
to BN_CTX_start() that allows its variables to be automatically sanitised
on release during BN_CTX_end(). This way any higher-level function (and
perhaps the application) can specify this flag in its own
BN_CTX_start()/BN_CTX_end() pair, and this will cause inner-loop functions
specifying the flag to be ignored so that sanitisation is handled only once
back out at the higher level. I will be implementing this in the near
future.
parent 5c98b2ca
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