Fastcrypto: Pioneering Cryptography Via Continuous Benchmarking
Konstantinos Kryptos Chalkias, Jonas Lindstrøm, Deepak Maram, Ben Riva, A. Roy, Alberto Sonnino, Joy Wang · 2024
In the rapidly evolving fields of encryption and blockchain technologies, the efficiency and security of cryptographic schemes significantly impact performance. This paper introduces a comprehensive framework for continuous benchmarking in one of the most popular cryptography Rust libraries, \textttfastcrypto. What makes our analysis unique is the realization that automated benchmarking is not just a performance monitor and optimization tool, but it can be used for cryptanalysis and innovation discovery as well. Surprisingly, benchmarks can uncover spectacular security flaws and inconsistencies in various cryptographic implementations and standards, while at the same time they can identify unique opportunities for innovation not previously known to science, such as providing a) hints for novel algorithms, b) indications for mix-and-match library functions that result in world record speeds, and c) evidences of biased or untested real world algorithm comparisons in the literature.