locally initialising their own.
NB: I've removed the "BN_clear_free()" loops for the exit-paths in some of
these functions, and that may be a major part of the performance
improvements we're seeing. The "free" part can be removed because we're
using BN_CTX. The "clear" part OTOH can be removed because BN_CTX
destruction automatically performs this task, so performing it inside
functions that may be called repeatedly is wasteful. This is currently safe
within openssl due to the fact that BN_CTX objects are never created for
longer than a single high-level operation. However, that is only because
there's currently no mechanism in openssl for thread-local storage. Beyond
that, this might be an issue for applications using the bignum API directly
and caching their own BN_CTX objects. The solution is to introduce a flag
to BN_CTX_start() that allows its variables to be automatically sanitised
on release during BN_CTX_end(). This way any higher-level function (and
perhaps the application) can specify this flag in its own
BN_CTX_start()/BN_CTX_end() pair, and this will cause inner-loop functions
specifying the flag to be ignored so that sanitisation is handled only once
back out at the higher level. I will be implementing this in the near
future.
Remove certain redundant BN_zero() initialisations, because BN_CTX_get(),
BN_init(), [etc] already initialise to zero.
Correct error checking in bn_sqr.c, and be less wishy-wash about how/why
the result's 'top' value is set (note also, 'max' is always > 0 at this
point).
the same thing.
Also, I have some stuff on the back-burner related to some BN_CTX notes
from Peter Gutmann about his cryptlib hacks to the bignum code. The BN_CTX
comments are there to remind me of some relevant points in the code.
two functions that did expansion on in parameters (BN_mul() and
BN_sqr()). The problem was solved by making bn_dup_expand() which is
a mix of bn_expand2() and BN_dup().
