mailing list of musl libc
 help / color / mirror / code / Atom feed
From: Denys Vlasenko <vda.linux@googlemail.com>
To: musl <musl@lists.openwall.com>
Cc: gcc@gcc.gnu.org, llvmdev@cs.uiuc.edu,
	 GNU C Library <libc-alpha@sourceware.org>
Subject: Re: Compiler support for erasure of sensitive data
Date: Thu, 22 Oct 2015 18:09:31 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAK1hOcMx+ibdoEE95h2R5+y6Znf1S4X0cSq-s3Nv+cuRk5-DuA@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <55F05FF1.3000405@panix.com>

On Wed, Sep 9, 2015 at 6:36 PM, Zack Weinberg <zackw@panix.com> wrote:
> The first, simpler problem is strictly optimization.  explicit_bzero
> can be optimized to memset followed by a vacuous use of the memory
> region (generating no machine instructions, but preventing the stores
> from being deleted as dead); this is valuable because the sensitive
> data is often small and fixed-size, so the memset can in turn be
> replaced by inline code.

How valuable is that speedup due to possible inlining?

You know, call instruction is not a crime.
In fact, it is *heavily* optimized on any CPU exactly because
calls happen gazillion times every second.

In my measurement, on x86 call+ret pair is cheaper than
a single read-modify-write ALU op on L1 data item!

So, just implement explicit_bzero() as a function which
is prohibited from inlining, and which clears all call-clobbered
registers in addition to clearing memory.

This will probably also be the smallest solution code size wise.


      parent reply	other threads:[~2015-10-22 16:09 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 18+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2015-09-09 16:36 Zack Weinberg
2015-09-09 16:39 ` Fwd: " Zack Weinberg
2015-09-09 16:41   ` Zack Weinberg
2015-09-09 16:42 ` Rich Felker
2015-09-09 16:47   ` [musl] " Zack Weinberg
2015-09-09 17:13     ` Rich Felker
2015-09-09 18:48       ` [musl] " Zack Weinberg
2015-09-09 20:05         ` Rich Felker
2015-09-09 16:52 ` Paul_Koning
2015-09-09 16:58   ` Zack Weinberg
2015-09-09 17:25     ` [musl] " Rich Felker
2015-09-09 17:54 ` David Edelsohn
2015-09-09 18:02   ` Paul_Koning
2015-09-09 18:11     ` David Edelsohn
2015-09-09 19:03     ` Zack Weinberg
2015-09-09 20:26       ` Szabolcs Nagy
2015-10-22 16:02         ` [musl] " Denys Vlasenko
2015-10-22 16:09 ` Denys Vlasenko [this message]

Reply instructions:

You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:

* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
  and reply-to-all from there: mbox

  Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style

* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
  switches of git-send-email(1):

  git send-email \
    --in-reply-to=CAK1hOcMx+ibdoEE95h2R5+y6Znf1S4X0cSq-s3Nv+cuRk5-DuA@mail.gmail.com \
    --to=vda.linux@googlemail.com \
    --cc=gcc@gcc.gnu.org \
    --cc=libc-alpha@sourceware.org \
    --cc=llvmdev@cs.uiuc.edu \
    --cc=musl@lists.openwall.com \
    /path/to/YOUR_REPLY

  https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html

* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
  via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line before the message body.
Code repositories for project(s) associated with this public inbox

	https://git.vuxu.org/mirror/musl/

This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for NNTP newsgroup(s).