Re: [v6 PATCH 0/7] crypto: stm32 - Save and restore between each request

[Herbert Xu]

On Tue, Mar 07, 2023 at 02:55:29PM +0100, lionel.debieve@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
>
> The issue about the context management relies on a question I've get time to
> ask you. There is no internal test purpose (using test manager) that really
> show the need of a hash update that needs to be "self-content". We've seen

Indeed this functionality is sorely missed.  It shouldn't be hard
to implement, because simply hashing two different requests
interleaved with each other should show the problem:

init(A) => update(A) => init(B) => update(B) => final(A) => final(B)

> the issue using openssl use cases that is not using import/export.
> I'm wondering to understand the real need of import/export in the framework
> if the request must be safe itself?

The hash state is normally stored in the request context.  The
import/export functions let you save a copy of the state for
subsequent processing.  The request could then be freed after
the export and re-allocated prior to import, or in other contexts
the request could be reused for a completely different hash in
the time being (init/update/final).

> >From hardware point of view, it is a penalty to wait for completion to save
> the context after each request. I understand the need of multiple hash
> request in // but I was wondering that it can be managed by the
> import/export, but it seems I was wrong. The penalty of the context saving
> will impact all hash requests where, in a runtime context is probably not
> the most important use case.

Oh of course we try to avoid unnecessary savings/restoring as much
as we can.  That's why we encourage users to use finup/digest as
much as possible, in which case there may be be no need to save and
restore at all.

However, if the user has to do a partial update through the update
function, then we have to save the state.

Cheers,
-- 
Email: Herbert Xu <herbert@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Home Page: http://gondor.apana.org.au/~herbert/
PGP Key: http://gondor.apana.org.au/~herbert/pubkey.txt