After one week of Trump, it is clearer than ever that Americans must stand against the incoming administration, and for what is right. But take heart: God's justice is so inevitable that, as long as we are standing with Him and against injustice, it is as though we have already won.
Wow, it's been a long time since I updated. Let's see, what's new...
Life is mostly the same as ever. I'm still working at Cryptography Research. I'm still living on San Francisco's Potrero Hill. I'm still editing this page in a text editor. A few new papers up on the site today.
My side project these days is Ed448-Goldilocks, particularly the Decaf branch. Will I get it to 1.0 this summer? Time will tell.
Hopefully between biking around the city, fun with Lydia and some casual rock climbing, I can get in better shape. Meanwhile, life goes on.
I've been working on a crypto math library, which I'm intending to post (in alpha form) and whitepaperize before too long, but in the meantime I'm going to mention some of the tricks I've found for math over 𝔽q. These tricks are probably known already, so if they're yours, email me and I'll cite you. I'm mainly comparing my results to MPFQ and MIRACL. In my limited testing, I was unable to coax competitive results out of MIRACL, but I probably have the compilation flags wrong, so I've been comparing more to MPFQ.
Techniques for Montgomery multiplication have been studied extensively; I relied most on the work of Koç, Acar and Kaliski. In their terminology, I found a variant of FIPS (Finely Integrated Product Scanning) to be fastest on x86-64 hardware. Product scanning — focusing on a given place-value in the product, instead of in one of the operands — avoids juggling carries, which is painful on x86 architectures. Furthermore, at least in theory it plays nicely with the deeply pipelined multiplier on some Intel chips, because it does not block results using low-order bits on those using high-order bits. The result is a multiplier which is around twice as fast as MPFQ on my Sandy Bridge laptop, costing just over 100 cycles for a 256-bit Montgomery multiply (includes function call latency, but the timings are confused some by TurboBoost).
I conjecture, but have not yet verified, that an operand-scanning mechanism like FIOS would be faster on ARM. This is because carries can be handled with the UMAAL (unsigned multiply double accumulate long) instruction, which lets you use an entire word as a carry flag. Almost the entire multiplication can be done using UMAAL, without the need for any other form of carry tracking.
It has been noted before (eg by Hachez and Quisquater) that the final subtraction of a Montgomery multiply is not strictly necessary. This is, I think, more true than most cryptographers realize. Montgomery multiplication on numbers a and b computes (ab+xp)/2w, where w is the size of the multiply in bits and x is some fudge factor less than 2w. This means that if a and b are both at most 2w/2√p then the result will be at most 2p. Thus if p is sufficiently less than 2w and the algorithm has all its addition and subtraction chains broken up by multiplications, the operands will remain bounded. Note that this makes reductions after additions and subtractions unnecessary as well, which is important as constant-time reductions are expensive. The results will not of course be fully reduced, but they will be correct modulo p. On a 64-bit machine this works very well for p near 2160 or 2224 where w is 192 or 256, respectively. Signed wide multiplication is expensive, so negative numbers can be dealt with by adding a suitable multiple of p before multiplication.
Something more might be gained by lazy reduction, i.e. by accumulating several products and then reducing mod p. However, except in special cases, this disrupts integrated reduction algorithms (especially FIPS). I have yet not tested performance with lazy reduction, so there may be significant gains to be had, especially on ARM where FIPS is probably unprofitable, or in quadratic extension multiplies where special cases can occur.
For quadratic extension fields, complex squaring and Karatsuba multiplication seem to work best, as previously reported by Devegili, hÉigeartaigh, Scott and Dahab. However, there is another optimization opportunity for cubic-over-quadratic fields. To construct the quadratic field, adjoin i=√-1 instead of √-2 (this makes some operations slightly faster anyway). Then to multiply over the cubic field, use Toom-Cook: not on (0,±1,2,∞) but on (0,±1,±i). The result looks like a Fourier multiplication algorithm, complete with butterfly gates. By my count this algorithm uses 27 add/subs instead of 35 add/subs for standard Toom-Cook-3 and 15 for Karatsuba-3, so Toom-Cook trades 12 adds for a multiply instead of 20. This trick may even outperform Chung-Hasan for squaring because it uses 5 squarings and no multiplies, and the subfield's "complex" squaring algorithm is much faster than multiplication. What's more, when using the above reduction trick, the structure of this "Toom-Cook-3i" algorithm allows us to make all the inputs to the subfield multiplication algorithm positive by adding a single bias on the subfield term of each operand (though this doesn't work quite as well as we'd like because Karatsuba doubles the bias).
The above algorithm computes 4 times the product instead of 6 times, so the actual product can be recovered more quickly with two divisions by 4. What's more, as mentioned by DhÉSB such divisions may not be necessary. In the case of pairings, the extra factor will be canceled by the final exponentiation, but even when we are not computing pairings, an extra factor can be compensated for by dividing all cubic-extension elements by 4. This trick works exactly the same way as compensating for Montgomery multiplication's division by 2w. It does not affect multiplication by subfield elements, but it does affect addition, subtraction and conversion of subfield elements.
Similar algorithms may be used in other cases. Multiplication in quartic-over-quadratic fields can use a 6th root of unity (if it is not in the base field), and sextic-over-quartic can use a 5th root of unity. It may also be practical to use a direct sextic-over-quadratic extension, speeding up Toom-Cook simply taking advantage of the additional low-norm elements in the subfield.
I've also tried this trick (on paper) with cube roots of unity, the golden ratio and √±2, and so far √-1 is best except in the quartic-over-quadratic case.
I hope to soon finish implementing elliptic-curve arithmetic and pairings using these techniques. Then we'll see if I can get a significant speedup over the current state of the art.
It's about time I updated this blog, so here goes. I'm interning at Google this summer, and will soon leave and enter the 5th year of my PhD. Google is nice, but the code I'm working on is frustrating and messy. And yes, the free food is great. I also like that it's (difficult) biking distance from my house, so when I'm not feeling lazy I can have a nice morning and evening bike ride.
It seems like everyone is getting married. My roommate Eric is engaged, and there are two other weddings coming up in September, including my grandfather! (Next on my to-do list: figure out travel plans for those weddings.) I guess it's just that time of life, though I feel a little sad to be left out of the party (and for a while, too, since I don't have a girlfriend right now). But good things come to those who wait...
My health hasn't been great this summer, but hopefully it's just a passing phase and I'll be all back to normal this fall.
A few months ago, Emily, Dan and I released version 0.8 of the Stanford Javascript Crypto Library, the smallest, cleanest, fastest, awesomest Javascript crypto library out there. On this weekend's to do list: finish importing Emily's elliptic curve crypto code. The trickiest thing about this, and one which I probably didn't get quite right, is defense against timing attacks. On the one hand, Javascript is a hard environment to defend against this attack on, and also an environment that you don't expect to fall under attack this way. But on the other hand, it seems silly not to offer any protection. So I've made some effort to protect SJCL, but I expect that it's not perfectly tight. I'm not sure this is the right trade-off: the code might be faster or simpler without these protections.
I've been playing Starcraft II since the mid beta. It's interesting to see how reviews tend to go wild in one direction or the other. To me, the game seems pretty good, not especially original but a worthy sequel of Starcraft I. The multiplayer is a lot of fun. The campaign is OK... not great but not terrible. I suppose it's annoying that the campaign is only Terran (with a little Protoss sprinkled in), but it does allow them to go into depth with Terran-specific campaign mechanics. Also, I'm sure that almost everyone who's considering buying the game knows about the campaign by now.
Similarly, I'm sure everyone knows that it's a trilogy, so that Blizzard is planning to sell you another game next year. This is interesting psychologically: would you be happier if the same game weren't part of a trilogy? (I'm sure there are legitimate reasons, such as the 3-part campaign or the fact that your friends will upgrade.)
The DRM has the usually annoyance/convenience tradeoff: you can just download and play on any machine, but you can't play offline multiplayer, and you can't create multiple instances of the campaign. What's more, you can't make a learning account. I'd kind of like to play Zerg in a low league and Terran or Protoss in a higher one, but as it is I've postponed learning Zerg, which is sad because this way I can't go random. Oh well.
My quals paper was on
making AES
implementations more secure by using vector permutations to compute
the S-box. Only recently did I get around to cleaning up and
releasing the code. It's hosted
at Stanford's crypto
site for export control stupid reasons. It's in the
public domain, so use it for whatever. Except not anything too
important, since it's version 0.5 and needs more testing.
In completely unrelated news, I misbooked my Thanksgiving flight. Delta wants $180-$200 to change it... might as well just get another ticket. This is probably the point, though you'd expect them to make it more worthwhile to fly Delta again instead of rebooking on some other carrier.
It took a while, but catameringue is back online, now hosted from the Riddlair. Thanks, Robert and Shaddin!
CRYPTO 2009 is going well, though I didn't manage to make slides in time for the rump session. I've also been playing too much Civ IV and doing too little mingling between sessions. But I've gotten to see many friends and acquaintances that I haven't seen in a long time.
Long post because I like to geek out over this sort of thing.
I'm in the process of rebuilding the shiftleft.org server, meringue, into a smaller, more power-efficient machine, with the goal of moving it out of my apartment into someone's closet or something. I'm using an M350 case and a pair of notebook hard drives for storage. Because of the way the dual hard-drive mounts look, and because I like dumb puns, I'm calling it “catameringue”.
I've had a few problems so far. First up, I got a 24-pin PSU by mistake instead of the 20-pin version, so the whole thing is currently hooked up to a ginormous ATX PSU. I botched the install (turns out the Hardy /etc/passwd and my earlier Ubuntu /etc/passwd have different UIDs for certain daemons...) and it took me several hours to figure out what was wrong and correct the problem. So that's why the server was down for an evening. What's more, there are lignering stability issues. They might be caused by powernowd, which doesn't meaningfully reduce power consumption anyway, so I've turned it off.
But my biggest concern is cooling. The combination of the M350, EPIA EN12000EG and two hard drives seems like a cooling nightmare:
Right now it has the top of the case off to accomodate the huge desktop PSU, and despite all of the above it keeps plenty cool with no fan. The northbridge temperature hits 60°C under load (CPU temperature tops out at 44°C), which is fine. But once the case cover is on, who knows? I suppose I could jury-rig it with tower mounting, side fans or no case lid, but this seems like a big hack for a new machine.
If I really can't get it to work, I'll have to either remove one of the hard drives (not sure what RAID 1 is getting me anyway) or get a more efficient motherboard, or both.
Pics will occur when it's done. It's a shame I didn't get any of the machine hooked up to an external hard drive, external DVD drive and ATX PSU; the DVD drive and PSU are each almost as big as the entire case.
Yay! I'm on vacation. I went to the HRSFA house party over the 4th of July in Washington DC. The party was awesome, lots of people I hadn't seen in ages, delicious food, board gaming and geeky conversations for almost 4 days. Dominion went over very well, thanks Mom and Ken!
I'm now in Canada, visiting Esther's folks. It's also really fun, except that I seem to have come down with some sort of cold. And as always with me, every cold is a nasty cold. Boo.
My site should now look good on iPhones and similar mobile devices. Tell me if you see any bugs.
Edit: Bugs include things like not using any CSS in Firefox 3.0. Oops.
I went to the Freedom Summit this past weekend. It was a conference on “human trafficking” (a.k.a. slavery... I honestly don't know why they use that term). While I was vaguely aware that slavery still exists in other countries, I was surprised to find out both the scope of the problem — about 27 million slaves worldwide — and that it's still present in the US — about 200 thousand slaves, including several slave-trade rings in the bay area.
The conference itself was an explicitly Christian event. The main thesis was that individual Christians and the church as a whole are called to fight injustice wherever it occurs, and slavery is one of the greatest injustices of our time. Francis Chan's preaching was spectacular, and he really convinced me that action is required. But of course, I'm a coward. I know that Christianity is supposed to radically change my life, but my life is actually pretty comfortable right now, and I'm afraid of what that change would bring. So as of now, I'm only doing cowardly things to fight slavery, like raising awareness by blogging about it.
So what can be done to fight slavery? The most straightforward is missions to set slaves free, mostly by getting police to break up slave-trade rings, and to help them find an honest living once they're free. But this is an endeavor for the brave. (Well, sort of. You can always google for sketchy massage parlours in your area, investigate them, surveil them, and get them busted for sex slavery.) Aside from that, you can give logistical or financial support to groups which do this, most notably International Justice Mission and Agape International Missions.
On another front, it's important to break the economics of slavery. Unfortunately, the biggest sector of slavery in the US and worldwide is sex slavery, and other than not visiting brothels there's not much you can do about that economically. But agricultural slavery is easier: you can buy fair trade, particularly for coffee and chocolate.
To fight industrial slavery, there's a similar effort called free to work. Free to work companies pledge to avoid slave labor in their contractors and suppliers as well as their own factories. Because this is a fairly high bar and free to work is a fairly new effort, only a a couple dozen companies have taken the pledge, but that's changing. And you can help it change by asking your workplace to take the pledge.
And of course, if you're both cowardly and lazy like me, you can at least get the word out. Blog about it, facebook it, tell your friends, or wear something orange to show your support. More information at Not For Sale.
Yay, my paper got into CHES 2009. I'll need to change it pretty heavily to reflect my work with Intel platforms, though.
I've been reading through the Bible (starting as a Lenten devotion, but hopefully I'll be able to keep it up). Certain verses have struck me as interesting, in odd ways, as I've been reading. Here are some of them, from the NIV (© Zondervan, 1984):
“… 3Go up to the land flowing with milk and honey. But I will not go with you, because you are a stiff-necked people and I might destroy you on the way.”
19The Lord was with the men of Judah. They took possession of the hill country, but they were unable to drive the people from the plains, because they had iron chariots.
1These are the nations the Lord left to test all those Israelites who had not experienced any of the wars in Canaan 2(He did this only to teach warfare to the descendants of the Israelites who had not had previous battle experience): 3…
16Dividing the three hundred men into three companies, he placed trumpets and empty jars in the hands of all of them, with torches inside.
I'm adding a recipes section to this site. Right now it just has pancakes on it, but more recipes should be following.
Praise the Lord! I passed quals.
Hopefully the paper I wrote for quals will be publishable... maybe at CHES 2009?
[update] That means don't let your friends do this.
We played the paper game (a.k.a. telephone pictionary) at Saturdinner and it came up. The starting phrase was "We didn't start the fire / It was always burning / Since the world's been turning". Also amusing: "Captain Pirate has no pants" and "Frosty the Snowduck plays the violin".
A very occasional hobby of mine is repurposing quotes from classical works whose words have changed meaning. A few off the top of my head:
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Lady of ShalottOut flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror cracked from side to side...
Herman Melville, Moby-DickThis warp seemed necessity; and here, thought I, with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own destiny into these unalterable threads.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient MarinerThe many men, so beautiful!
And they all dead did lie:
And a thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on; and so did I.
I had a lot of free time over break, and used some of it to hack together a new templating system for this site. The site is basically written in XML, with a hodge-podge of perl and XSLT translating it to the shiny form you see here. It's somewhat slow on meringue (stupid Saxon... takes over a second to load up that JVM), but is otherwise pretty usable. Hopefully the upshot is that I'll update this site more often... it's been ages...
There are still some kinks to be worked out, so let me know if stuff doesn't work.
Hopefully this site will have something on it soon. It's been too long...
To do:
