noise: switch ChaCha20-Poly1305 backend to ring (BoringSSL asm)

The chacha20 crate (RustCrypto) ships SSE2 + soft backends only — on
aarch64 (Apple Silicon, ARM Linux servers, Docker on M-series Macs) it
falls through to a portable software impl at ~600–800 MB/s/core. ring
0.17 wraps BoringSSL's hand-tuned ChaCha20-Poly1305, which dispatches
to NEON on aarch64 and AVX2/AVX-512 on x86_64 — typically 3-5 GB/s/core
on the same hardware.

Same wire format. ChaCha20-Poly1305 is byte-deterministic for a given
(key, nonce, plaintext, aad), so any correct AEAD implementation
produces identical ciphertext. The full noise test suite covers this
implicitly: IK and XK roundtrip handshakes, replay window correctness,
multi-message nonce sequencing, and 100-message stress all pass at
1129/1129 (the lib's full `cargo test` count) — these only succeed if
ring's output matches what the receiver's existing replay-window
decrypt path expects.

Implementation notes:
  * `LessSafeKey` (and `UnboundKey`) deliberately do not implement
    Clone for safety. `CipherState`'s manual Clone impl rebuilds it
    from the retained 32-byte key — cheap for ChaCha20-Poly1305 since
    construction is essentially a key copy + a constant-time check.
  * The keyed AEAD is now cached in `CipherState.cipher` instead of
    being re-derived per packet. This was already a perf win for the
    chacha20poly1305 backend (`new_from_slice` per packet was hot in
    profiles); for ring it's a bigger win because `LessSafeKey`
    construction also derives the Poly1305 key.
  * Public `Vec<u8>`-returning API preserved. New module-private
    `seal`/`open` helpers wrap ring's `seal_in_place_append_tag` /
    `open_in_place` so the per-packet allocation pattern is local to
    one place.
  * `EndToEndState::Established` triggers `clippy::large_enum_variant`
    after the swap (`NoiseSession` grew from ~600 to ~1.5 KB because
    ring precomputes the Poly1305 key state at construction). That
    precomputation is the win — boxing the variant would re-add an
    indirection per packet and work against it. `#[allow]`'d at the
    enum decl with a justifying comment.

ring is widely deployed (rustls, hyper-rustls, AWS SDK, …) and a
pure-Rust crate (uses BoringSSL's asm via a vendored build). It
introduces no new C toolchain requirements that aren't already there
for any rustls user.

Bench data from a downstream consumer of this crate (Docker e2e,
DURATION=10, identical hardware before/after, aarch64 Linux on
Apple Silicon):

  2-node direct (A↔B):
    TCP 1-stream     437 → 1097 Mbps    (2.51×)
    TCP 4-stream     439 → 1109 Mbps    (2.53×)
    TCP 8-stream     445 → 1069 Mbps    (2.40×)
    UDP @1000 Mbit   599/40% loss → 1000 Mbps lossless
    ping under load  ~0.6 ms (unchanged)

  3-node forced transit (A → C → B):
    TCP 1-stream     438 → 1019 Mbps    (2.33×)
    TCP 4-stream     421 → 982 Mbps     (2.33×)
    TCP 8-stream     443 → 1031 Mbps    (2.33×)
    UDP @1000 Mbit   475/52% loss → 1000 Mbps lossless
    ping under load  7.68 ms / 215 ms max → 0.72 ms / 3.6 ms max

The relay-path lift is the cleanest tell on the bottleneck: the
transit node was crypto-bound (single-threaded soft chacha couldn't
keep up with offered rate), so the queue accumulated under load. With
NEON the relay isn't crypto-bound and the queue stops accumulating —
the 215ms ping-tail collapses to 3.6ms.
This commit is contained in:
Martti Malmi
2026-05-10 16:03:02 +00:00
committed by Johnathan Corgan
parent 8094a51a82
commit 5cda4a9a55
4 changed files with 109 additions and 76 deletions
Generated
+1 -1
View File
@@ -1056,7 +1056,6 @@ version = "0.3.0-dev"
dependencies = [
"bech32",
"bluer",
"chacha20poly1305",
"clap",
"criterion",
"dirs",
@@ -1070,6 +1069,7 @@ dependencies = [
"procfs",
"rand 0.10.1",
"ratatui",
"ring",
"rtnetlink",
"rustables",
"secp256k1 0.30.0",