[e2e] Re: [Tsvwg] Really End-to-end or CRC vs everything else ?

[David P. Reed]

Because I proposed secure auth vs. checksum, I've gotten real curious about 
relative performance of checksums, CRC32, MD5 and MD5-MAC.  Since there is 
an open source project called OpenCL that has implementations of CRC32 and 
MD5, I thought I'd investigate, and found that there were already 
benchmarks of that code.  Their somewhat surprising result is that MD5-MAC 
is slightly *faster* than CRC32 in that implementation.  (on 392 MHz 
Pentium, 264 Mb/sec vs. 252 Mb/sec).  Don't know how fast a 16 or 32-bit 
checksum would be.  See: http://opencl.sourceforge.net/bmarks.php

Since I'm a bit twiddler at heart, I'm going to "optimize" the CRC32 code 
and the MD5-MAC code just to see if this is because of poor implementation.

But one might very sensibly choose MD5-MAC for all the reasons I've 
mentioned earlier about foiling the foul middleboxes.