Commit 5f762af3 authored by Antoine Pitrou's avatar Antoine Pitrou

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

parent f61e7910
......@@ -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,
......
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