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bpo-40791: Make compare_digest more constant-time. (pythonGH-23438) (pythonGH-23767)

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 GH-1 from https://bugs.python.org/issue40791 .)
(cherry picked from commit 3172936)

(cherry picked from commit 8bef9eb)

bpo-40791: Make compare_digest more constant-time. (pythonGH-23438) (pythonGH-23767)

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 GH-1 from https://bugs.python.org/issue40791 .)
(cherry picked from commit 3172936)

Co-authored-by: Devin Jeanpierre <[email protected]>
(cherry picked from commit 8bef9eb)
@rickprice rickprice requested a review from icanhasmath April 11, 2024 01:45
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The original fix for Python 3.6, and Python3.7 don't seem to include any tests for this.

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Looks good - this is what they say.

@icanhasmath icanhasmath merged commit 30222de into 2.7 Apr 17, 2024
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4 participants