Re: [PATCH] poly1305: generic C can be faster on chips with slow unaligned access

[Eric Biggers <ebiggers@google.com>]

On Thu, Nov 03, 2016 at 11:20:08PM +0100, Jason A. Donenfeld wrote:
> Hi David,
> 
> On Thu, Nov 3, 2016 at 6:08 PM, David Miller <davem@davemloft.net> wrote:
> > In any event no piece of code should be doing 32-bit word reads from
> > addresses like "x + 3" without, at a very minimum, going through the
> > kernel unaligned access handlers.
> 
> Excellent point. In otherwords,
> 
>     ctx->r[0] = (le32_to_cpuvp(key +  0) >> 0) & 0x3ffffff;
>     ctx->r[1] = (le32_to_cpuvp(key +  3) >> 2) & 0x3ffff03;
>     ctx->r[2] = (le32_to_cpuvp(key +  6) >> 4) & 0x3ffc0ff;
>     ctx->r[3] = (le32_to_cpuvp(key +  9) >> 6) & 0x3f03fff;
>     ctx->r[4] = (le32_to_cpuvp(key + 12) >> 8) & 0x00fffff;
> 
> should change to:
> 
>     ctx->r[0] = (le32_to_cpuvp(key +  0) >> 0) & 0x3ffffff;
>     ctx->r[1] = (get_unaligned_le32(key +  3) >> 2) & 0x3ffff03;
>     ctx->r[2] = (get_unaligned_le32(key +  6) >> 4) & 0x3ffc0ff;
>     ctx->r[3] = (get_unaligned_le32(key +  9) >> 6) & 0x3f03fff;
>     ctx->r[4] = (le32_to_cpuvp(key + 12) >> 8) & 0x00fffff;
> 

I agree, and the current code is wrong; but do note that this proposal is
correct for poly1305_setrkey() but not for poly1305_setskey() and
poly1305_blocks().  In the latter two cases, 4-byte alignment of the source
buffer is *not* guaranteed.  Although crypto_poly1305_update() will be called
with a 4-byte aligned buffer due to the alignmask set on poly1305_alg, the
algorithm operates on 16-byte blocks and therefore has to buffer partial blocks.
If some number of bytes that is not 0 mod 4 is buffered, then the buffer will
fall out of alignment on the next update call.  Hence, get_unaligned_le32() is
actually needed on all the loads, since the buffer will, in general, be of
unknown alignment.

Note: some other shash algorithms have this problem too and do not handle it
correctly.  It seems to be a common mistake.

Eric