openwall / openwall/john

Make HMAC CPU formats use SIMD and OpenMP fully

Open
#5,421 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

enhancement
Dominant language
C
Stars
13.6k
Forks
2.6k
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Description

I was surprised to find that our HMAC CPU formats use scalar hashing code in set_key even when building with SIMD. This also puts such code out of OpenMP parallel sections. We should probably replace this with equivalent functionality inside crypt_all, reached when new_keys is set (we already have some code only reached on new_keys in there, but we could move more code to there).

No wonder there's such a big difference between Many vs. Only one salt speeds for these formats. These changes should improve the Only one salt speed (as well as actual cracking with few different salts).

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Locate the HMAC CPU format implementations and compare the scalar setup in set_key with the existing new_keys path in crypt_all. Trace how these functions interact with SIMD builds and OpenMP sections; done means equivalent setup runs through crypt_all when new_keys is set and improves the Only one salt path without changing cracking behavior.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
c
Domain
cryptography, performance, security
Issue type
Refactor
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
30/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.