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Comment by colemickens | Hacker News Reader

What does Rust the language have to provide in order to achieve side channel resistant algorithms? That doesn't sound right to me. There are primitives in other languages that are needed? Or Rust doesn't abstract at the right level?

edit: thanks for the explanations!

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Most high-level languages don't provide guaranteed-constant-time behavior at all. That's a big reason why ring uses lots of BoringSSL's/OpenSSL's assembly language code.

Also, one of my goals with the ring project is to identify exactly what constant-time utilities are needed for a crypto library, so that I can draft a proposal for improving the Rust language and libraries to provide such features.

> Most high-level languages don't provide guaranteed-constant-time behavior at all.

Does even C provide such guarantees? Isn't the compiler free to rewrite the code it's compiling in whatever way it wishes as long as the output is the same?

C doesn't and even Assembler doesn't entirely. DJB has pushed and is still pushing(?) Intel to publish more information about these things.

Ultimately, it's an optimizing compiler, and it's difficult/impossible to tell the compiler "make this code fast, but not too fast for these specific cases". The same problem affects basically every language that isn't assembly.

It might even affect assembly, if your CPU's microcode optimizations are sufficiently aggressive.

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