Overview

Improve the performance of the symmetric encryption by removing any hex encoding and instead transferring the encrypted data as byte arrays.

This will be most notable when decrypting many background messages in quick succession, especially large messages such as state messages with the sendUpdate method.

The cause of this issue was primarily the hex parsing algorithm in the Browserify Buffer.from polyfill. When receiving a background message, browser profiling showed that ~80% of the time spent was simply converting hex data to byte arrays.

A synthetic benchmark ran in the extension showed a reduction of 75% from ~1.4ms per iteration to ~0.35ms when decrypting a 5KB message 100,000 times.

Changes

Common

• Remove all hex encoding and decoding.
• Update related unit tests and mock data.

App

• Update LavaMoat policies.