alt Hacker NewsI think this part is really worth engaging with:
> Later, moving public key parsing to our own Rust code made end-to-end X.509 path validation 60% faster — just improving key loading led to a 60% end-to-end improvement, that’s how extreme the overhead of key parsing in OpenSSL was.
> The fact that we are able to achieve better performance doing our own parsing makes clear that doing better is practical. And indeed, our performance is not a result of clever SIMD micro-optimizations, it’s the result of doing simple things that work: we avoid copies, allocations, hash tables, indirect calls, and locks — none of which should be required for parsing basic DER structures.
I was involved in the design/implementation of the X.509 path validation library that PyCA cryptography now uses, and it was nuts to see how much performance was left on the ground by OpenSSL. We went into the design prioritizing ergonomics and safety, and left with a path validation implementation that's both faster and more conformant[1] than what PyCA would have gotten had it bound to OpenSSL's APIs instead.
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It is extremely common that a correct implementation also has excellent performance.
Also, even if somebody else can go faster by not being correct, what use is the wrong answer? https://nitter.net/magdraws/status/1551612747569299458
Now I wonder how much performance is being left on the table elsewhere in the OpenSSL codebase...
Remember LibreSSL? That was borne of Heartbleed IIRC, and I remember presentation slides saying there was stuff in OpenSSL to support things like VAX, Amiga(?) and other ancient architectures. So I wonder if some of the things are there because of that.