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Crypto implementations (was: C source)



L'octidi 28 messidor, an CCXXIV, Jonathan Dowland a écrit :
> FWIW, last time I wanted to do md5 in C, I copied the code into my own
> project. I got it from the source to dpkg, which did the same thing.

By doing that, you are depriving yourself of future bugfixes and
improvements to that implementation. Well, MD5 is pretty much set in stone
and can be completely tested, so it is not a serious concern, but I wanted
to underline it for the record.

More importantly, by doing that, you are depriving yourself of all
optimizations that were introduced in more mature crypto libraries. Since
MD5 is computationally intensive, this is a serious concern. If your project
only does a few MD5 on small chunks of data while spending most of its time
in other tasks, then it is certainly fine. Otherwise, this is a very bad
idea. The difference is quite significant, sometimes more than 30% depending
on the hardware.

I have found that OpenSSL's implementation was the fastest amongst readily
available crypto implementations (gcrypt, libtomcrypt, libavutil).

Regards,

-- 
  Nicolas George

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