RustCrypto
Optional compact round keys for AES fixslice
In the current fixslice implementation there is some redundancy in the way keys are stored (2x for fixslice32, 4x for fixslice64). This enables the round keys to simply be XORed in for each round.
It is possible to store the round keys in a compact format and expand them in each round, which requires a few additional instructions (prototype code for fixslice64 puts this at 10% slower; the penalty will be smaller for fixslice32). The memory saving for the key storage is then: 50% i.e. 176/208/240 bytes for fixslice32 AES 128/192/256 respectively, or 75% i.e. 528/624/720 bytes for fixslice64.
Is there a standard cfg attribute for constrained memory devices, and/or should this project support a feature making smaller memory footprint a priority?
In some crates we have no_unroll feature (e.g. kuznyechik and keccak), which trades performance for reduced binary size.
It looks like expanding round keys per each encrypt_blocks call will be quite inefficient. We probably should first introduce a method which will process &mut [Block<Self>].
As of the latest release of cipher (v0.2.5) there are now BlockCipher::{encrypt_slice, decrypt_slice} methods:
https://docs.rs/cipher/0.2.5/cipher/block/trait.BlockCipher.html#method.encrypt_slice
These would allow you to expand the round keys before operating over a sequence of blocks.
