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Comment by johnisgood | Hacker News Reader

So there are more bugs in a more readable and understandable programming language (C) as opposed to asm? What gives? I am asking because intuition would say the opposite since asm is much more lower-level than C.

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The core primitives written in assembly operate on fixed sized blocks of data; no allocations, no indexing arrays based on raw user controlled inputs, etc. Moreover, the nature of the algorithms--at least the parts written in assembly, e.g. block transforms--means any bugs tend to result in complete garbage and are caught early during development.

In OpenSSL, the C code is doing stuff that is hard to validate exhaustively like dealing with wire protocols, different sized buffers that have to be handled in special ways, dynamic memory allocation, etc

The assembly code is for the kernels themselves. Usually it’s a loop with easy to understand bounds, usually zero pointer chasing. Mostly math. Definitely no calls to malloc/free

So it’s not that assembly has an advantage over C. It’s that the kinds of things that get written in assembly also happen to:

- Be the sort of code where accidentally overflowing a buffer is unlikely because the indexing is the easy part. And there’s no interesting downcasting or allocation happening

- Be the sort of code where timing side channels are disastrous and the only way to know for sure you don’t have one is to look at the assembly

Crypto primitives tend to have very simple control flow (those that don’t are usually insecure) and even simpler data structures. You won’t find many branches beyond “is there another block?” in a typical block cipher or hash, for example.

compiler optimization is a blackbox. shortcuts to crypto routines will allow side channel attacks

Is it actually more readable and understandable (not to be confused with more familiar), though? It is hard to beat the understandability of the lowest level. Abstractions add unknowns. C's claim to fame was being a "portable assembler"; freeing developers from having to write the same program over and over and over for different systems.

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