Resolving Multi-Threading Issues in ElGamal by Upgrading NTL Library from 9.10.0 to 11.5.1

Resolving Multi-Threading Bugs by Upgrading NTL from 9.10.0 to 11.5.1

This document describes a multi-threading issue encountered during the development of an ElGamal cryptosystem and how upgrading the Number Theory Library (NTL) from version 9.10.0 to 11.5.1 resolved the problem.

Issue Description

Problem Overview

While implementing a parallel version of the ElGamal cryptosystem using NTL, you encountered several critical bugs when executing decryption in a multi-threaded environment. The issues manifested as:

• Segmentation Faults: The program crashed with segmentation faults (core dumped).
• Invalid Pointer Errors: Errors like mremap_chunk(): invalid pointer were observed, indicating problems with memory management.
• Undefined Behavior in InvMod: Specifically, the error InvMod: inverse undefined occurred during decryption, suggesting issues with multi-threaded access to shared resources or improper handling of modular inverses.

Initial Diagnosis

The issues were consistently reproducible when running the ParallelDecrypt method with multiple threads. The errors pointed towards potential thread safety issues within NTL’s implementation, particularly in functions like InvMod and PowerMod, which are critical for the decryption process.

Attempted Solutions

1. Mutex Locking: Introducing mutexes to protect access to shared resources within the DecryptBlock method. This approach did not fully resolve the issues and only masked the underlying problem.
2. Simplifying Thread Management: Attempting to reduce the complexity of thread management and data processing within the decryption function. Despite these efforts, segmentation faults and undefined behavior persisted.

Final Solution: Upgrading NTL

Root Cause

It was determined that the older version of NTL (9.10.0) did not fully support thread safety, particularly in the context of C++11 features and multi-threaded environments. The inconsistencies and errors were likely due to insufficient handling of thread-local storage and concurrent access in the older NTL version.

Upgrading to NTL 11.5.1

The final solution involved upgrading NTL from version 9.10.0 to version 11.5.1. The newer version of NTL introduced significant improvements, including:

• Enhanced Thread Safety: NTL 11.5.1 provides robust support for multi-threading, utilizing C++11 and later standards. It includes better management of thread-local storage and concurrent operations, making it suitable for multi-threaded cryptographic computations.
• Bug Fixes: Several bugs related to multi-threading and memory management were fixed in the newer versions, addressing the core issues encountered during parallel decryption.

Steps to Upgrade

1. Remove the Old NTL Version:

   rm -rf $HOME/local/include/NTL
   rm -rf $HOME/local/lib/libntl.a
   

2. Download and Install NTL 11.5.1:

   wget https://libntl.org/ntl-11.5.1.tar.gz
   tar -xzf ntl-11.5.1.tar.gz
   cd ntl-11.5.1/src
   ./configure PREFIX=$HOME/local NTL_THREADS=on
   make
   make install
   

3. Verify Threading Support:
   Ensure that NTL_THREADS is enabled in the new installation:

   grep NTL_THREADS $HOME/local/include/NTL/config.h
   

4. Rebuild Your Project:
   Update your project to link against the new NTL library and rebuild:

   make clean
   make
   

Conclusion

After upgrading to NTL 11.5.1 with threading support enabled, the multi-threading issues in your ElGamal cryptosystem implementation were fully resolved. The program now runs reliably in a multi-threaded environment, leveraging the enhanced capabilities of the updated NTL library.

This upgrade highlights the importance of using up-to-date libraries, especially when dealing with complex features like multi-threading in cryptographic computations.