Usuba: Optimizing & Trustworthy Bitslicing Compiler

Abstract

Bitslicing is a programming technique commonly used in cryptography that consists in implementing a combinational circuit in software. It results in a massively parallel program immune to cache-timing attacks by design. However, writing a program in bitsliced form requires extreme minutia. This paper introduces Usuba, a synchronous dataflow language producing bitsliced C code. Usuba is both a domain-specific language -- providing syntactic support for the implementation of cryptographic algorithms -- as well as a domain-specific compiler -- taking advantage of well-defined semantics invariants to perform various optimizations before handing the generated code to an (optimizing) C compiler. On the Data Encryption Standard (DES) algorithm, we show that Usuba outperforms a reference, hand-tuned implementation by 15% (using Intel's 64 bits general-purpose registers and depending on the underlying C compiler) whilst our implementation also transparently supports modern SIMD extensions (SSE, AVX, AVX-512), other architectures (ARM Neon, IBM Altivec) as well as multicore processors through an OpenMP backend.