Yes agreed, and also when you put this into a product there’s usually a whole 
bunch more considerations than just the raw numbers of how fast the hardware 
can execute a given crypto primitive. However I wanted to find an example that 
was public information since companies are often loath to share details of 
their hardware designs. Despite the imperfect example hopefully the point was 
not lost that it’s not uncommon for SHA-256 HMAC to run faster than AES-GCM.

Thanks,

--Jack

From: Eric Rescorla <e...@rtfm.com>
Sent: Thursday, February 11, 2021 6:12 PM
To: Jack Visoky <jmvis...@ra.rockwell.com>
Cc: John Mattsson <john.mattsson=40ericsson....@dmarc.ietf.org>; TLS@ietf.org
Subject: Re: [TLS] EXTERNAL: TLS 1.3 Authentication and Integrity only Cipher 
Suites



On Thu, Feb 11, 2021 at 3:08 PM Jack Visoky 
<jmvis...@ra.rockwell.com<mailto:jmvis...@ra.rockwell.com>> wrote:
Hi Eric,

I don’t have numbers offhand but I will say that many platforms I have 
experience with have some sort of HW support, and might include things like 
DMA. In these cases ChaCha20-Poly1305 is way behind in terms of performance 
(which is expected as I believe it was mainly targeted to software-only 
implementations).

I’ll anticipate that someone might ask if GCM is not better that SHA-256 with 
hardware support, and of course I will have to say it depends on the platform. 
For some cases it will be, and others it will not. Here is a link to some 
performance numbers which show SHA-256 is faster than GCM 
https://www.ti.com/lit/an/swra667/swra667.pdf?ts=1613069390182<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/www.ti.com/lit/an/swra667/swra667.pdf?ts=1613069390182__;!!JhrIYaSK6lFZ!-6S_R_nnK8VCShKHEDM4SzTQUP6OhRI_3xs9gT162qITF1bi4gMu5gPOGAsjoGT_zMvL$>.
 In other cases GCM may not be supported on a platform but SHA256 is, of course 
that’s kind of a strawman but it could occur.

I doubt it covers the whole difference, but I'd note that SHA-256 is not the 
right comparison point, because what you need here is HMAC, which requires 
nested SHA invocations. This is especially relevant if you have to go back and 
forth to the hardware each time.

-Ekr

Note I am not endorsing this platform or affiliated with it in any way, just 
want to give an example. And it really is just an example, sorry to repeat 
again but I just want to drive home the point that YMMV on things like this.

Thanks,

--Jack


From: Eric Rescorla <e...@rtfm.com<mailto:e...@rtfm.com>>
Sent: Thursday, February 11, 2021 2:51 PM
To: Jack Visoky <jmvis...@ra.rockwell.com<mailto:jmvis...@ra.rockwell.com>>
Cc: John Mattsson 
<john.mattsson=40ericsson....@dmarc.ietf.org<mailto:40ericsson....@dmarc.ietf.org>>;
 TLS@ietf.org<mailto:TLS@ietf.org>
Subject: Re: [TLS] EXTERNAL: TLS 1.3 Authentication and Integrity only Cipher 
Suites



On Thu, Feb 11, 2021 at 11:13 AM Jack Visoky 
<jmvis...@ra.rockwell.com<mailto:jmvis...@ra.rockwell.com>> wrote:
Hi John, Eric,

Thanks for the input. We will certainly make some changes to the draft 
regarding the inspection case. However, I can’t support removing the 
performance/latency information completely, as I have heard from those who have 
this very concern. That said, we will edit the language to make it clear that 
this is not true in all cases.

Well, the draft just claims that there are latency concerns, but doesn't 
present details. If you want to make this case, it would be helpful to present 
performance numbers that show that these ciphersuites are substantially faster 
than the alternative algorithms (in particular ChaCha20/Poly1305) which is 
quite fast on many low end platforms.

-Ekr

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