> if anything in performance Have to be careful not to leak data in a crypto timing attack. A good analogy of the problem would be: If one compared a long se

> if anything in performance Have to be careful not to leak data in a crypto timing attack. A good analogy of the problem would be: If one compared a long secure password one byte at a time and instantly returned an error upon failure of first match, it looks like a nice long password, but with an oscilloscope you could figure out the long password by repeatedly guessing one byte of the password at a time because each time you get one byte's worth correct, it fails a couple cycles later in the process. It "feels" like a 16 character string should be somewhat less than 2 * 128 bits of security (aside from normal looking text doesn't use all 8 bits per byte) but it would really only require on average 16 * 128 attempts to crack any 16 character password via this timing attack because on average you'd guess the next letter of the password every hundred or so attempts. Obviously real attacks are more obscure, but anything that messes with control flow is worrisome. Its theoretically possible to write code that would be secure on a "dumb" processor but under some kind of branch predicting out of order "smart" processor that might not even exist at the time the code is written, running the code might leak crypto data. This can all be worked around at some effort.