for specialized Montgomery ladder implementations
PR #6009 and #6070 replaced the default EC point multiplication path for
prime and binary curves with a unified Montgomery ladder implementation
with various timing attack defenses (for the common paths when a secret
scalar is feed to the point multiplication).
The newly introduced default implementation directly used
EC_POINT_add/dbl in the main loop.
The scaffolding introduced by this commit allows EC_METHODs to define a
specialized `ladder_step` function to improve performances by taking
advantage of efficient formulas for differential addition-and-doubling
and different coordinate systems.
- `ladder_pre` is executed before the main loop of the ladder: by
default it copies the input point P into S, and doubles it into R.
Specialized implementations could, e.g., use this hook to transition
to different coordinate systems before copying and doubling;
- `ladder_step` is the core of the Montgomery ladder loop: by default it
computes `S := R+S; R := 2R;`, but specific implementations could,
e.g., implement a more efficient formula for differential
addition-and-doubling;
- `ladder_post` is executed after the Montgomery ladder loop: by default
it's a noop, but specialized implementations could, e.g., use this
hook to transition back from the coordinate system used for optimizing
the differential addition-and-doubling or recover the y coordinate of
the result point.
This commit also renames `ec_mul_consttime` to `ec_scalar_mul_ladder`,
as it better corresponds to what this function does: nothing can be
truly said about the constant-timeness of the overall execution of this
function, given that the underlying operations are not necessarily
constant-time themselves.
What this implementation ensures is that the same fixed sequence of
operations is executed for each scalar multiplication (for a given
EC_GROUP), with no dependency on the value of the input scalar.
Co-authored-by: Sohaib ul Hassan <soh.19.hassan@gmail.com>
Co-authored-by: Billy Brumley <bbrumley@gmail.com>
Reviewed-by: Andy Polyakov <appro@openssl.org>
Reviewed-by: Matt Caswell <matt@openssl.org>
(Merged from https://github.com/openssl/openssl/pull/6690)
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