Verification of ed25519 signature in prod app takes 3-5x more time

Current Behavior

Vanilla JS check script like https://gist.github.com/ukstv/5038bcb000808e2b349f8b6f7956d6b3 reports it takes about 20ms for signature verification. If run inside a full application like https://github.com/ceramicnetwork/js-ceramic (if similarly wrapped in console.time/console.timeEnd) it takes 70-100ms to do the same. I find it odd that verification time depends on the application so much.

Expected Behavior

Time required for verification should be similar, not 3-5x larger.

Environment Details

Please provide any relevant information about your setup. This is important in case the issue is not reproducible except for under certain conditions.

• node/browser version: v14.17.1
• OS Version: macOS Big Sur (Darwin feather 20.5.0 Darwin Kernel Version 20.5.0: Sat May 8 05:10:33 PDT 2021; root:xnu-7195.121.3~9/RELEASE_X86_64 x86_64)
• Device details: Intel MBP

[ukstv]

@kdenhartog Simplest way to expose this:

1. git clone js-ceramic,
2. npm install && npm run build
3. Go to node_modules/dids/lib/did.js, line 132: did_jwt_1.verifyJWS(jws, publicKeys);
4. Wrap the line with console.time('did-jwt.verifyJWS') ... console.timeEnd('did-jwt.verifyJWS')
5. cd core && npm run test.

There you can see the time it takes for the function to complete. Note, DID resolution happens few lines above and does not affect did-jwt.verifyJWS in any way.

[mirceanis]

Thanks for the examples and for finding the “culprit” code 😃

This behavior of iterating through possible verification methods and checking each one has been there from the early days, and will likely always remain (possibly only as a fallback).

Using the verification method identified by a kid is a planned improvement to this library. Essentially, if there is a kid present in a header, then it must be used to filter through the publicKeys and only pick a matching key id for the actual cryptographic verification. (tracking this in #191)

I’ll close this issue now since the “slowness” has been identified.