HunterBeast on Nostr: In cryptography, timing can be incredibly important. Some things are made to be ...

In cryptography, timing can be incredibly important. Some things are made to be intentionally slow, like the argon2id cryptographic hashing function, to consume lots of memory and computation to mitigate brute force attacks.

Some things are made to be faster, like signature algorithms like secp256k1. This doesn't compromise security, but it does improve node syncing performance, and reduces hardware requirements.

Finally, some things are built to take a constant amount of time, especially when handling keys or other secrets, because certain inputs can reveal the secret depending on how long the operation takes.

Ensuring code gets executed in constant time gets complex and often this guarantee can be broken as compilers update over time. To humans, it looks like secure code, but computers just see inefficient code.

Cryptography is complex and there's a lot to know. This knowledge is built up over a lifetime. There's still a lot I don't know, perhaps some cryptographer is cringing even as I write this, but it's just what I've been able to gather so far.