Date: Sun, 12 Jan 2014 14:02:47 +0400
From: Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>
To: discussions@...sword-hashing.net
Subject: Re: [PHC] escrypt memory access speed (Re: [PHC] Reworked KDF available on github for feedback: NOELKDF)

On Sat, Jan 11, 2014 at 04:42:10PM -0500, Bill Cox wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 11, 2014 at 2:23 PM, Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com> wrote:
> > New speed for 1 Salsa20 round and p=32, on idle machine:
> >
> > real    0m1.286s
> > user    0m39.523s
> > sys     0m1.183s
> >
> > Not much change here. :-)
> >
> > 2*3*10*2^30/10^9/1.286 = 50.10 GB/s
> 
> Holy cow!  That's serious speed, dude.  The best graphics, FPGA, or
> ASIC attack could not do more than 4-5X better.

... or 7x, if we look at Xeon Phi 7120P's stated 352 GB/s max memory
bandwidth.  It has 16 GB GDDR5 on board.  What probably mitigates such
attacks is the high latency and thus the need for prefetch into each
core's cache, which the sequential nature of scrypt mostly prevents.  An
attacker could run multiple instances to hide the latency, but only ~7
instances (2 GB each) would fit on the 7120P.  Well, maybe 7 would be
enough to reach much greater speed, considering that I got 12.88 GB/s on
a lower-clocked Xeon Phi with only one instance and no SIMD code.

> >> In fact, if we were to regard only the Salsa20 rounds as computation
> >> that the attacker will need to perform, then even round counts higher
> >> than 8 could be more optimal in attack area*time terms, from defender's
> >> point of view.  Since GB/s is proportional to memory usage for fixed
> >> running time (or actually the other way around), we can estimate AT
> >> costs (in arbitrary units) as follows:
> >>
> >> 48.95 GB/s * 2 rounds = 97.90
> >> 45.63 GB/s * 4 rounds = 182.52
> >> 38.03 GB/s * 8 rounds = 304.24
> >> 30.43 GB/s * 12 rounds = 365.16
> >> 19.93 GB/s * 20 rounds = 398.60
> 
> Imagine that all the lines of code you've written in C for escrypt,
> other than for memory access, will cost an attacker maybe $0.02 per
> core, and that Salsa20/20 will run in maybe 2 clocks instead of 1 for
> Salsa20/1.  This is roughly the case, within maybe 2X in cost and
> clock cycles.  It's pointless trying to make an ASIC attacker's
> arithmetic cost significant in either time or money, so we have to
> focus on memory size and bandwidth.  For defense against ASIC attacks,
> your Salsa20/1 benchmark is the best.  50GB/s!  Nice!

Nice speed, yes, but I'm not so sure that there's only a 2x difference
in speed between Salsa20/20 and Salsa20/1 in an ASIC that also accesses
memory, unless it simply bumps into its memory bandwidth on anything
faster than Salsa20/10.  And I'm pretty sure there's a nearly 20x
difference between these in an ASIC that only does computation - e.g.,
if we doubled the number of SHA-256's involved in Bitcoin mining, the
mining ASIC hash rates would be halved, for same die area, etc. - right?

Yes, we may have Salsa20/N - for any realistic N - in just one clock
cycle, but this means we run it at a lower clock rate.  For example, how
many SHA-256 steps are there per pipeline stage in Bitcoin mining ASICs?
My non-expert gut feeling suggests at most 4.  What's your guess?
(And yes, we need to reverse-engineer some of them to find out.)  My
understanding is that with too much sequential work done per pipeline
stage, we leave much of the logic idle much of the time.  Once signal has
propagated to further parts of the circuit, the portions of the circuit
closer to its inputs are idle.  Having less work per pipeline stage
helps keep all logic busy: by the time the signal has propagated, we
take it to the next stage and reuse the current stage's logic for the
next set of inputs.  Now, I admit we can't benefit from a pipeline when
all we have is one instance of Salsa20/N and our (attacker's) goal is
solely to minimize latency.  But even then, I don't see why having a
large number of rounds in one clock cycle would substantially reduce the
total latency, as compared to having only a few rounds per cycle.
I think the latency in ns should be similar regardless of how this is
structured - well, perhaps only slightly lower (like by 10%) with more
rounds per clock cycle.  Am I wrong?

I think the added latency from having (reasonably) more computation may
increase the AT cost, by tying up the memory for longer.  This reduces
our reliance on attackers' memory bandwidth being limited.

Alexander

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