[PYTHON-CRYPTO] HMAC module

[Bram Cohen]

Paul Rubin wrote:

> There's a very fast SHA implementation included with OpenSSL, that
> you could compare with Python's implementation.  Type "openssl speed
> sha" to run a benchmark.  Again, there's lots of overhead for short
> strings.  "2M/sec" is uninformative unless the string length is
> specified.

Python 2.1.3 (#1, Apr 20 2002, 10:14:34)
[GCC 2.95.4 20011002 (Debian prerelease)] on linux2
Type "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> from time import time
>>> from sha import sha
>>> x = 'a' * 2 ** 20
>>> def test():
...     t = time()
...     for i in xrange(100):
...         sha(x).digest()
...     print 100.0/(time() - t)
...
>>> test()
1.34924164806

so that's 1.35 megs/sec on megabyte size blocks.

openssl reports 3.63 megs/sec on blocks of 8k.

that's a factor of 2.7 difference. Python's sha1 is, in fact, slow.

-Bram Cohen

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