On Tuesday, March 27, 2012 2:38:57 PM UTC+1, michael85 wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> I have started working on a client server system in C++ for privacy
> preserving signal processing applications. Since this system will rely on
> certain public key cryptography primitives, I decided to try and implement
> them with MPIR, since GMP seems a bit more complicated to compile on
> Windows... In this (long) message, I will detail my current progress with
> MPIR, the inconsistencies / errors that I noticed and, at the end, some
> questions.
>
> At the moment, I downloaded mpir-2.5.1 and I think I managed to build the
> library for x64 and the SandyBridge platform - dll_mpir_sandybridge (I'm
> working on a Core i5 SandyBridge). In order to do this, I had to run the
> build.vc10\mpir_config.py (need to cd to \build.vc10\ before running it) in
> order to create the dll and lib projects for this platform (by the way,
> \build.vc10\readme.txt says to use "mpir_build.py" which does not exist).
> Afterwards, from the VS GUI, I had some issue with the prebuild.bat script,
> because you need to add the path for the sandybridge option into it in
> order to build this project, so I added this line:
>
> if /i "%1" EQU "sandybridge" ((set sdir=x86_64w\sandybridge) & (set
> platform=x64))
>
> (hopefully, I got it right)
>
> After this, I noticed some inconsistencies in the documentation concerning
> the way it creates directories:
> - \dll\x64\Release
> - \lib\x64\Release
> - \build.vc10\x64\Release
> - the build.vc10\lib and \build.vc10\dll remain empty
>
> Afterwards, I decided to build the tests, to check if all went OK. For
> this, I build the lib_mpir_cxx project first (mpir-tests.sln it nags about
> a missing mpirxx.h without it). Sometimes, it throws build errors for
> certain test projects (regarding missing add-test-lib). I managed to get
> all of them to build correctly only after running build on add-test-lib and
> then (re)building those that fail one by one. I think it has something to
> do with the build order and some concurrency issues. Can they be built in
> batch mode without involving VS?
>
> I went to the \build.vc10\mpir-tests directory and ran run-tests.py. I got
> an error: no such file or directory '..\\dll\\x64\\Release\\mpir.dll at
> line 33. From what I can tell, the path there is wrong, probably because of
> the directory inconsistencies I mentioned above. I corrected it and got
> that 182 tests ran correctly (some were skipped with message "test
> suppressed for windows DLL").
>
> \build.vc10\readme.txt mentions a last_build.txt generated in
> \build.vc10\, but I am unable to find it. Perhaps this functionality got
> removed...
>
Hi
Thank you for a most useful report of the issues that you faced in building
MPIR. This will, I hope, allow me to ensure that these issues are smoothed
out in our next release. In particular, the Python build generator in
MPIR 2.5.x is still experimental so I am not surprised that you ran into a
few issues. And, as you have discovered, I have been moving the output
directories to make it easier to build MPIR for future Visual Studio
releases.
Questions:
> - I don't have that much experience in designing and writing
> (multiplatform) C++ applications from scratch and I was wondering if there
> is any article or book that helps in this sense or maybe some project that
> I could, at least, use as inspiration;
> - I saw that GMP has also added a C++ class interface. Is it compatible
> with the MPIR one?
>
I believe that they are compatible although I cannot be certain about this
because I think that the C++ interface in GMP might have evolved since MPIR
forked from it.
- The documentation states that "MPIR does not support the secure
> cryptographic functions provided by GMP". Could you please detail this
> statement?
>
Several MPIR team members who are involved in both MPIR and cryptographic
information security believe that neither MPIR nor GMP are suitable for
cryptographic use. In consequence we have decided not to add functions that
give any impression that such use is supported.
I can't speak for everyone here, but my reason for this decision is that
both GMP and MPIR place great emphasis on speed at the expense of code
structure, code quality and code correctness (look at the code if you don't
believe me). In consequence code analysis and the verification of code
correctness - often critical requirements for cryptographic code - are at
best difficult and at worst impossible.
> - For the client - server communication part, I think that OpenSSL is a
> good choice, which, as far as I've read, can be configured to use GMP as a
> big number library. Does this mean that I can use it with MPIR as well? Is
> there any guide on how to do this?
>
In compatibility mode MPIR should be a direct replacement ffor GMP.
> - Since MPIR is forked from GMP to make it more Windows friendly, does
> this create any issues under Linux? At the moment, I am thinking of trying
> to use a Linux virtual machine for tests on my current platform. Are there
> any issues with running this library in a virtual machine?
>
I will leave someone else with direct experience of such use to answer
this.
Brian
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