A lattice-based cryptographic library in Go

by rch • 7 years ago

73 14 7 years ago

Note that this comes out of a group at EPFL, a university known for cryptography research.

Can anyone explain how they're achieving comparable performance to C++ using Go, for someone who has never programmed in Go?

fwip• 7 years ago

Go goes pretty fast, especially if you program it like C (avoiding memory allocations).

drvd• 7 years ago

Go is fast. No interpreter, no JIT, plain machine code combined with the ability to lay out your data like you can in C.

Abishek_Muthian• 7 years ago

But the availability numerical libraries have been lackluster in my limited exploration.

pcwalton• 7 years ago

That's surprising to me, because I don't see any SIMD use in this library. I guess the C++ libraries they're comparing against aren't using SIMD either and aren't effectively using autovectorization. I don't believe that the Go compiler autovectorizes.

KenoFischer2• 7 years ago

Yes, you are correct, the C++ libraries in this field have decent performance, but generally haven't been tuned to hell yet (though they do tend to use all the algorithmic tricks people know about). Which is good news for those of us writing non-C++ versions of these algorithms because it means state of the art performance isn't all that hard to achieve.

dgb23• 7 years ago

You have less control in Go, it being garbage collected and omitting pointer arithmetic. It also ships with a runtime and is statically compiled so the binary you get is 'large'. 'goroutines' (similar to green-threads) are very lightweight and be integrated with high-level CSP constructs (channels & select) or lower level concurrency primitives from the std lib.

From what I've seen benchmark wise Go performs well. It is in the ballpark of fast, statically compiled, garbage collected languages, comparable to fast C#, Java etc. roughly speaking but surpasses them on certain tasks. If I remember correctly there are several web/http/json related tasks where Go is a top performer.

pjmlp• 7 years ago

Go supports pointer arithmetic as unsafe code (which is what it is in practice).

Thaxll• 7 years ago

"RNS-accelerated Fan-Vercauteren version of Brakerski's scale invariant homomorphic"

def outside of my skills ~~ Interesting nonetheless!

KenoFischer2• 7 years ago

That's just a fancy way of referencing a particular paper. None of those terms mean anything outside this particular subfield.

mitchtbaum• 7 years ago

Lattices seem like they'll have great value, in general, once higher dimensional data structures become common geometric orientations like in crypto apps and databases.

thecupisblue• 7 years ago

Hey! Nice to see someone thinking so, do you think a lattice based database would be a good solution? I just implemented a lattice structure recently and anybody I try talking to about it looks at me like I'm crazy. I thought maybe I got something wrong about the structure but there are so many advantages.

gaahrdner• 7 years ago

The Lattigo library unleashes the potential of lattice-based cryptography in secure multiparty computation for modern software stacks.

To a layman like myself, what does this mean?

littlestymaar• 7 years ago

Here's my attempt:

Lattice-based crypto:

Regular public-key crypto mostly use one kind of mathematical structures (finite fields) who have a known hard problem (finding the discrete logarithm of a number of a finite field) while the reverse problem (calculate the power of n of a given number) is trivial. You can do crypto on every structure for which it exists such a problem.

Latice are different mathematical structures, for which it exists different kinds of problems that can be used for crypto.

secure multiparty computation

Let say you have some confidential data X and I have some confidential data Y. What we want to do is compute f(X,Y) without sharing the X and Y because we don't trust one another (or any third party).

I hope it helped.

A lattice-based cryptographic library in Go

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