Date: Wed, 8 Jan 2014 21:09:39 -0500
From: Bill Cox <waywardgeek@...il.com>
To: discussions@...sword-hashing.net
Subject: Re: [PHC] Lyra, Password Key Derivation Based On The Sponge Construction

On Wed, Jan 8, 2014 at 7:48 PM, Peter Maxwell <peter@...icient.co.uk> wrote:

>
>
>
> On 8 January 2014 23:46, Bill Cox <waywardgeek@...il.com> wrote:
>
>> RC4 is the perfect example to use, and I disagree about the entropy
>> ratio.  If you have 20 bits of entropy in a user's password, and 256 bits
>> of entropy from salt, using RC4 initialized from this 276 bits to generate
>> 4GB of hash data is a *good* idea.
>>
>
> Only if you're talking about the tiny minority of systems that can afford
> to use 4Gb of memory that you can guarantee is protected and not ever paged
> to disk, *per-login*.  If your server needs to handle even 10 logins per
> second, that's a wee bit of a problem... it wasn't that long ago that I was
> admining production webservers with 1Gb memory or less.
>

Catena's framework offers a good solution for this.  Servers that can't
support the load of compute and memory intensive KDFs have the option of
offloading to the client.  I am a big fan of "Server Relief Support".  At
the same time, that does not mean that the KDF has to be compute or memory
intensive in applications that can't support it.  That's what m_cost and
t_cost are for.  However, the value of a memory-hard KDF goes up in
proportion to the memory used.


> If you cannot guarantee to protect that entire 4Gb blob leakage then as
> Poul-Henning pointed out your lack of entropy becomes an issue, i.e. the
> salt is public and therefore doesn't count towards the entropy so your 20
> password bits is only 2^20 ~ 1m combinations and an attacker can
> potentially determine the password from even a small fragment* of that 4Gb
> keystream with less effort than the memory-hard problem.
>

I could use the world's best crypt-strength hash or permutation to fill
memory, and if an attacker gets access to it, he'll have a way to abort
incorrect password guesses early.  That's why I think we need to perform a
significant number of initial hashes on the password to create an
intermediate derived password before writing data derived from it to a lot
of memory.  If memory leaks to an attacker, and we've done 2048 rounds of
SHA-256 before filling memory, the attacker will be no better off than if a
user had bothered to protect his id_rsa private key the hard-coded maximum
of 2048 rounds of SHA-256.


> [*] - in this specific scenario with RC4, it would really need to be
> near the beginning of the keystream output but the argument generalises
> better if the filling algorithm is not cryptographically strong.
>

What argument?  Are people attackers going to invert the hash?


> My point is that it's useless to worry about the entropy of the data we
>> write to memory.  RC4 is already too strong, and a waste of CPU cycles.  So
>> long as we don't lose significant entropy along the way, any dumb hash that
>> an attacker has to actually compute is good enough.
>>
>
> As a side issue: RC4 is not generally considered particularly strong
> these days, there are non-trivial biases in the keystream.
>

Which is irrelevant for memory-hard KDFs.  Why should we care?


> The main question however concerns the feasibility of protecting memory
> regions that large, or for that matter anything anywhere near that large,
> when you're filling with password dependent data using an algorithm that
> can be easily inverted.
>

Easily inverted?  Not that it matters, but who cares if we can invert a few
steps of a hash when we have billions of operations needing inverting?


> In other words, if - like you said - you're not losing entropy along the
> way then it implies a permutation, and if it is easy to invert said
> permutation then an attacker only needs a word or two of memory to
> undermine your memory-hardness.
>

There can be weaknesses in a hash function that could potentially lead to
non-memory hardness.  The hash function has to be considered.  However,
some basic non-linearity and the property that entropy is not lost during
hashing (permutations or low collision hashes) is all that's required,
SFAIK.

Bill

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