This vocabulary provides common utility functions for cryptographic implementations.
These utilities are designed to avoid side-channel vulnerabilities that can leak secret information through timing, cache behavior, or other observable effects.
Constant-time operations
Security notes
Timing attacks exploit the fact that many operations take different amounts of time depending on the data being processed. For example, a naive byte-by-byte comparison returns early on the first mismatch, allowing an attacker to determine how many bytes of a secret value they have guessed correctly.
The functions in this vocabulary are designed to take the same amount of time regardless of the input values, preventing such attacks.
These utilities are designed to avoid side-channel vulnerabilities that can leak secret information through timing, cache behavior, or other observable effects.
Constant-time operations
constant-time= ( a b -- ? )
constant-time-zero? ( seq -- ? )
constant-time-select ( flag a b -- a/b )
Security notes
Timing attacks exploit the fact that many operations take different amounts of time depending on the data being processed. For example, a naive byte-by-byte comparison returns early on the first mismatch, allowing an attacker to determine how many bytes of a secret value they have guessed correctly.
The functions in this vocabulary are designed to take the same amount of time regardless of the input values, preventing such attacks.