Remove a detailed discussion of content-based short circuiting, off topic for library docs.

This commit is contained in:
Antoine Pitrou 2012-06-24 16:23:54 +02:00
parent f61e7910ea
commit 5f762af3bc
1 changed files with 4 additions and 13 deletions

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@ -70,22 +70,13 @@ This module also provides the following helper function:
.. function:: compare_digest(a, b)
Return ``a == b``. This function uses an approach designed to prevent timing
analysis by avoiding content based short circuiting behaviour, making it
appropriate for cryptography. *a* and *b* must both be of the same type:
either :class:`str` (ASCII only, as e.g. returned by
Return ``a == b``. This function uses an approach designed to prevent
timing analysis by avoiding content-based short circuiting behaviour,
making it appropriate for cryptography. *a* and *b* must both be of the
same type: either :class:`str` (ASCII only, as e.g. returned by
:meth:`HMAC.hexdigest`), or any type that supports the buffer protocol
(e.g. :class:`bytes`).
Using a short circuiting comparison (that is, one that terminates as soon as
it finds any difference between the values) to check digests for correctness
can be problematic, as it introduces a potential vulnerability when an
attacker can control both the message to be checked *and* the purported
signature value. By keeping the plaintext consistent and supplying different
signature values, an attacker may be able to use timing variations to search
the signature space for the expected value in O(n) time rather than the
desired O(2**n).
.. note::
If *a* and *b* are of different lengths, or if an error occurs,