Hacker News Reader

Comment by SEJeff | Hacker News Reader

The firedancer team at one of the better HFT firms wrote an AVX512 optimized implementation of ed25519 and X25519 that’s significantly faster than OpenSSL.

https://github.com/firedancer-io/firedancer/pull/716

Ditto for sha256: https://github.com/firedancer-io/firedancer/pull/778

And sha512: https://github.com/firedancer-io/firedancer/pull/760

If you’re an optimization nerd, this codebase is wild.

View on HN

I laughed a little at calling Firedancer contributors "a team at a HFT firm".

Not that you are technically wrong, not at all, that's where Jump came from. It's just that this is all completely blockchain-driven optimization, but the b-word is so dirty now that we've gotta go back to using TradFi for the rep.

It’s an optimization in hashing algorithms that is around twice as fast as the ones Amazon is posting in thus article for the same eliptic curves.

If the Amazon improvements are hacker news worthy (they are) this seems reasonable contextually.

Also, I worked for Jump for almost 12 years :)

What makes the “b-word” dirty?

The trough of disillusionment carved out by grifters burning the peat of enthusiasm unsustainably.

I didn’t use it because I didn’t find it relevant. They’re using hashing and EC algorithms and they’re improving them.

It's hard to separate from the sea of grifters, con men, cranks, and scammers that infest the domain. Just using the word is a yellow flag that you might be some kind of whacko, even if all you really want to talk about is the math.

People have to forever be on guard that you might at any point pivot to all taxation is theft or how you have formed your own micro nation that consists entirely of yourself and thus have diplomatic immunity from all prosecution. Because it happens. Or maybe you have a once in a lifetime deal to buy this receipt like object for some hideous art that is guaranteed to appreciate in value millions of percent. It's just the crowd that has aggregated around crypto currencies includes a lot of untrustworthy people.

Why do people need to be on guard for those beliefs? People should be critical thinkers and not thought police.

Granted, there are all kinds of whackos in crypto, but we should only be concerned about the immoral ones trying to scam us out of our money: SBF, Do-Kwon, and the like.

people are legitimately buying farming land in the US and currently suing farmers for "anti-trust" for refusing to sell them their land so that they can quite literally create a crypto based sovereign micro-nation of wealthy tech VC's. [1] and I think that is a selfish, vile and delusional thing to do. It has nothing to do with "thought police" its as simple as looking at the impact of their actions and beliefs and making the decision to reject that way of thinking and way of life.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHlcAx-I0oY

A lot of slowness comes typically comes from wanting to avoid methods that enable side-channel timing attacks

So many manhours spent on finding better ways to shovel around money and pocket what falls from the cracks.

What a wasteful and unproductive enterprise, considering the vast majority of the devised improvements never see the public eye.

Still, impressive work. Imagine if those brilliant minds behind this were focused somewhere else.

The greatest minds of our generation spend their time thinking about how to:

- make people click on ads

- make trading algos faster

- replace human artists

- build more efficient killing machines

- destroy any remaining concept of privacy

Hey, at least we had one of them working on TempleOS.

This directly implies that all the people that did useful stuff (improving cancer survivability, new vaccines, renewable energy, and others) are all "below" the "greatest minds of our generation".

Not to mention it also suggests there is a way to "compare" minds. I would not choose myself to do somethings, but that does not mean I despise automatically people choosing to.

I think they meant greatest minds have to be greatest money earners also. Else they are not greatest minds.

Aren't the greatest mind(s) of our generation writing Terry Tao's blog posts?

Greatest mind of previous generation made nuclear bombs and other deadly things.

What do you work on?

Public funded, public benefiting space missions.

I'll never be able to figure out what people get from repeating the same thing over and over. I've seen this same exact comment 1000 times on hn and I'm 100% sure you have too (indeed I believe the reason you repeat is because you've seen it and agree with it).

It's virtue signalling.

It doesn't seem wasteful and unproductive, given that the result of the HFT industry is smaller bid/ask spreads (lowering costs for all trades) and payment for order flow which is the mechanism that eliminated retail commissions and provides price improvement on many retail trades. And even so, HFT firms are making money.

It might not seem like real work, but making money by reducing costs of market participants sounds like a good thing. I admit though, block trades might be harder now than before the rise of HFT.

If you could do warehousing/distributing/coordinating fresh foods in a way that reduced the difference in price between the farmer and the consumer and make money doing it, that would clearly be good work.

I see they learned clang’s dirty little secret over intrinsics viz. that in producing the IR it deviates (sometimes dramatically when AVX-512 is concerned) from the documented opcodes and the results are inevitably detrimental.

This is why ffmpeg uses assembly, and people get extremely mad when you say it's done for a reason, because they always want to come up with a fancier abstraction (usually cross-platform) which then defeats the purpose because it doesn't actually work.

nb those abstractions do make sense when you can only afford to write a single implementation of the algorithm; then you're just talking about a high level programming language. But they frequently fail to achieve their goal when you're writing a second implementation for the sole purpose of being faster.

Completely agree re: firedancer codebase. There is a level of thought and discipline wrt performance that I have never seen anywhere else.

That team is full of world experts in high performance computing.

It's much more than just performance they've thought about. Here are some of the secure programming practices that have been implemented:

  /* All the functions in this file are considered "secure", specifically:
     - Constant time in the input, i.e. the input can be a secret[2]
     - Small and auditable code base, incl. simple types
     - Either, no local variables = no need to clear them before exit (most functions)
     - Or, only static allocation + clear local variable before exit (fd_ed25519_scalar_mul_base_const_time)
     - Clear registers via FD_FN_SENSITIVE[3]
     - C safety
  */

libsodium[4] implements similar mechanisms, and Linux kernel encryption code does too (example: use of kfree_sensitive)[5]. However, firedancer appears to better avoid moving secrets outside of CPU registers, and [3] explains that libraries such as libsodium have inadequate zeroisation, something which firedancer claims to improve upon.

[1] https://github.com/firedancer-io/firedancer/blob/main/src/ba...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic_curve_point_multiplic...

[3] https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/1713

[4] https://libsodium.gitbook.io/doc/internals#security-first

[5] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...

These are table stakes for core cryptographic code, and SOT crypto code --- like the Amazon implementation this story is about --- tend at this point all to be derived from formal methods.

As an example, the Amazon implementation doesn't refer to gcc's[1] and clang's[2] "zero_call_used_regs" to zeroise CPU registers upon return or exception of functions working on crypto secrets. OpenSSL doesn't either.[3] firedancer _does_ use "zero_call_used_regs" to allow gcc/clang to zeroise used CPU registers.[9]

As another example, the Amazon implementation also doesn't refer to gcc's "strub" attribute which zeroises the function's stack upon return or exception of functions working on crypto secrets.[4][5] OpenSSL doesn't either.[3] firedancer _does_ use the "strub" attribute to allow gcc to zeroise the function's stack.[9]

Is there a performance impact? [6] has the overhead at 0% for X25519 for implementing CPU register and stack zeroisation. Compiling the Linux kernel with "CONFIG_ZERO_CALL_USED_REGS=1" for x64_64 (impacting all kernel functions) was found to result in a 1-1.5% performance penalty.[7][8]

[1] https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Common-Function-Attribute...

[2] https://clang.llvm.org/docs/AttributeReference.html#zero-cal...

[3] https://github.com/openssl/openssl/discussions/24321

[4] https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-14.2.0/gcc/Common-Type-At...

[5] https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Stack-Scrubbing.html

[6] https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/1713.pdf

[7] https://www.phoronix.com/review/zero-used-regs/5

[8] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20210505191804.4015873-1-keesco...

[9] FD_FN_UNSANITIZED: https://github.com/firedancer-io/firedancer/blob/master/src/...

Zeroizing a register seems pretty straightforward. Zeroizing any cache that it may have touched seems a lot more complex. I guess that's why they work so hard to keep everything in registers. Lucky for them we aren't in the x86 era anymore and there are a useful number of registers. I'll need to read up on how they avoid context switches while their registers are loaded.

That looks really neat, but I still don't understand what firedancer actually is - what is a validator client for Solana and why does it need it's own crypto library?

It’s a new from scratch implementation of a validator for Solana the fastest blockchain by several orders of magnitude. The slowest part is signature verification so they sped up hashing to improve performance of the entire system.

They follow a first principles approach (the lead has a few physics degrees) and opted to speed up the cryptography. The beauty of this, despite the bad views on blockchain, is that they freaking sped up the cryptography of commonly used algorithms more than anything open or closed source that I personally am aware of.

It’s a win in cryptography, much like this Amazon post is, except it’s slower than the firedancer implementation.

Off topic - is Firedancer going to survive Jump winding down its crypto arm?

Kanav left, they liquidated a huge staked ETH position a few months ago (+ a bunch of other coins), and the SEC/CFTC is all over them for the Terra Luna fiasco.

Rumors of Jump’s demise are greatly exaggerated. Check the torrent of firedancer talks at Solana Breakpoint literally next week and decide yourself.

Folks have said jump is gonna die for 20+ years. They’ve been around 30ish…

Parent asked a specific question about the survival of Firedancer and winding down of the crypto arm though. No demise of Jump mentioned.

You will see a half dozen or so talks about firedancer and probably 35-40 or so of us total (I’m at the company that does security for firedancer, Asymmetric Research. We were founded by former jumpers).

You can make the determination on your own, but there will be an obvious large showing of firedancer folks and some exciting updates for the project.

> The beauty of this, despite the bad views on blockchain, is that they freaking sped up the cryptography of commonly used algorithms more than anything open or closed source that I personally am aware of.

For users that have AVX-512, which isn't widely available (AMD Zen 4 / Zen 5, Sapphire Rapids)...

Sure, and cpus supporting it will proliferate. Shockingly to no one reading hacker news... Both software and hardware continue to improve with time generally speaking. This was a huge software improvement on hardware that supports that functionality. It is a huge win for anyone wanting to use these algorithms where they can afford hardware that supports it.

We should celebrate Amazon's improvements and we should celebrate these improvements. Both are great for the future of technology, regardless of why they were initially developed. Improving tech and keeping it open source is good for all.

wow amazing, nobody is gonna edit that code ever again...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com