ocb3: improve handling of L values

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
30/100
Issue type
Refactor
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
rust
Domain
cryptography

Research direction

Start by locating cipher initialization and the encrypt/decrypt paths that use the pre-computed L table. Compare the three proposed strategies for runtime table sizing, stack allocation, and on-the-fly computation. Done means messages needing larger tables are handled without the current fixed-size limitation and the mode struct/API concerns are addressed.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Right now we pre-compute L values during cipher initialization. Size of the table is regulated by the const generic parameter and the mode instance can not process messages which require larger tables. Arguably, it's a quite leaky API especially considering somewhat subpar handling of default constants/types in Rust. The cached table can also significantly increase size of the mode struct.

Computation of one L value is just a relatively cheap DBL operation, so I think improve handling in one of the following ways:

  1. Re-compute the L table on each encrypt/decrypt call with table size computed at runtime depending on the message/AAD size. Since we don't have alloca in Rust, we can allocate a sufficiently large array on stack and initialize it only partially.
  2. Pre-compute a small table (e.g. sufficient for 1 MiB) and compute additional values at runtime if necessary by copying cached values to stack-based array and re-computing the rest.
  3. Pre-compute a small table and re-compute additional values on the fly if necessary from the last cached value.
Dominant language
Rust
Stars
961
Forks
200
Avg merge
1h 30m
Merged PRs (30d)
6

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