Draft Edition of LibTomMath book

[Peter Gutmann]

Werner Koch <wk at gnupg.org> writes:

>Does the proprietary SSH still use GMP?  I know no other major crypto apps
>using GMP for big number math.  

I've seen it used in a couple of lesser-known apps that I played with for
interop testing, nothing that counts as a major app though.  Maybe it's being
used by people who prefer the LGPL to the more widely-used OpenSSL bignum
lib's BSD license (or perhaps it's the fact that GMP has documentation :-).

>A problem with GMP is that it heavily uses alloca() and thus it is not that
>hard to find traces of secrets in the core.

Ouch!  This is a pity, because GMP seems to have the most active development
in terms of both algorithm optimisation and machine-specific optimisations -
if you want to find a version that runs well on $obscure_embedded_platform,
it's pretty much GMP or nothing.

Peter.


---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo at metzdowd.com