Now that we have modes in which the MAC verification happens before
any other crypto operation and hence will be the only thing seen by an
attacker, it seems like about time we got round to doing it in a
cautious way that tries to prevent the attacker from using our memcmp
as a timing oracle.
So, here's an smemeq() function which has the semantics of !memcmp but
attempts to run in time dependent only on the length parameter. All
the MAC implementations now use this in place of !memcmp to verify the
MAC on input data.