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Date: Sun, 18 Dec 2011 23:17:59 +0400
From: Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>
To: john-dev@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: Making a thread safe implementation of bitslice DES

On Sun, Dec 18, 2011 at 01:54:34PM -0500, Jordan Bradley wrote:
> I'm writing a multithreaded application (using pthreads) using OpenSSL's 
> DES_fcrypt function which does the job but is slow.

What are you doing this for?

> I'd like to use 
> JTR's bitslice implementation but it doesn't seem to be thread safe.

It is thread-safe (in 1.7.9) as long as each thread uses its own
instance of a DES_bs_combined structure.  This is what happens when
1.7.9 is built with OpenMP support, but you may as well use this with
explicit pthreads if you like.

Thread-safety generally has some performance cost, though.  This is why
when 1.7.9 is built without OpenMP support, it simply uses a static
instance of a DES_bs_combined structure, called DES_bs_all.  This avoids
the need for some pointer indirection.

There's also a DES_bs_all with OpenMP-enabled builds, but there
DES_bs_all is a C preprocessor macro that uses the global DES_bs_all_p
pointer and the local variable "t".  In your code, you may do it
similarly or differently.

> In the end I'd like it to be a drop-in replacement of DES_fcrypt()

This is impossible.  The whole point of doing a bitslice implementation
is that it will process multiple inputs in parallel and produce multiple
outputs.  This doesn't fit in the DES_fcrypt() interface.

Also, crypt(3) and DES_fcrypt() have some overhead to convert the ASCII
salt string to binary, to perform DES final permutation, and to encode
the resulting DES block with base-64 characters.  If you care about
performance, you'll want to avoid this kind of overhead, which implies
that you shouldn't use this interface.

Alexander

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