Secure Compare of Strings in Go

Question

Is the a built-in way of doing constant time string comparison in Go?

I've used the Devise.secure_compare method when I've needed this functionality in Ruby.

Answer 1

Not for strings but for []byte . See crypto/subtle , especially ConstantTimeCompare :

func ConstantTimeCompare(x, y []byte) int

ConstantTimeCompare returns 1 iff the two equal length slices, x and y, have equal contents. The time taken is a function of the length of the slices and is independent of the contents.

As you may know, you can easily convert a string to a byte slice:

var x []byte = []byte("someString")