bpo-40791: Make compare_digest more constant-time. (GH-20444)
* bpo-40791: Make compare_digest more constant-time.
The existing volatile `left`/`right` pointers guarantee that the reads will all occur, but does not guarantee that they will be _used_. So a compiler can still short-circuit the loop, saving e.g. the overhead of doing the xors and especially the overhead of the data dependency between `result` and the reads. That would change performance depending on where the first unequal byte occurs. This change removes that optimization.
(This is change #1 from https://bugs.python.org/issue40791 .)
2 files changed