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Re: MD5 is slow


From: Saku Ytti via NANOG <nanog () lists nanog org>
Date: Fri, 5 Sep 2025 18:55:28 +0300

On Fri, 5 Sept 2025 at 10:22, Vasilenko Eduard via NANOG
<nanog () lists nanog org> wrote:

Any hash MUST be slow (by design) to withstand brute force. In the network device case, it is about 5ms for SHA-2 (of 
course, dependent on the control plane processor).

Out of curiosity, how did you arrive at 5ms?  I don't think it is
important, but it is interesting to me.

I'm more arriving at around 1us on core from <10years ago (w/ SHA
instruction set) or 10us on older core per ISIS LSA.

But we can't still include even this 1us or 10us to the convergence
budget, because NOS almost always has most of the cores doing nothing,
due to poor design and no commercial pressure to improve. So if this
would actually matter, you could at the first point when receiving LSA
call sha_validate on another core with access to a shared pointer to
boolean sha_valid=false, which this other core sets to true, upon
validating SHA. Then the original core which is guaranteed to do work
exceeding 1us or 10us for that LSA will continue its work, and finally
check that sha_valid is true, if not reject the work it did, making
the integrity validation free provided it takes less time to validate
the integrity than it takes to calculate the topology.

-- 
  ++ytti
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