Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I'll have to come up with a decent way of allowing this, at some point.

It's really about creating an FFI for Fil-C, because Fil-C has its own calling convention and symbol mangling. It could be a lot of work.

And, worst case, it ends up being a footgun

View on HN

I'm sure for many people's $WORK the ability to run OpenSSH built with Fil-C and constant-time crypto would be amazing, and it would be great advertising for Fil-C. But there is no way any of us would run OpenSSH built with Fil-C in production w/o constant-time crypto.

That's good to know.

If I made the assembly memory safe under Fil-C rules by running it through a transform that inserted additional instructions but did not otherwise change what was happening, would you trust that it's still constant-time?

Yes. Don't branch on key or in-clear data. Otherwise, ok.

If a user is doing onion wrapping, they don't want you to branch on the code data either.

You can reason about it, that if the instructions in question are not dependent on a key or plaintext value then it won't affect the constant time nature of the implementation of the cryptographic algorithm.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com