Date: Tue, 11 Feb 2014 17:13:20 -0500
From: Bill Cox <waywardgeek@...il.com>
To: discussions@...sword-hashing.net
Subject: Interleaved attack on cache-timeing-resistant KDFs

It turns out that what matters most for a cache-timing-attack immune
KDF (like Catena) is memory bandwidth.  Everything else can be
accelerated by an attack in an FPGA.  There is no significant gain in
defense for running out of expensive on-chip cache, and there is no
significant gain for having a difficult to compute hash function (like
my multiplication compute-time hardened hash function).  It is far
more important to hammer the memory bandwidth, so a fast hash
function, and running hash functions in parallel are the important
things, as these increase memory bandwidth.

Consider the case of a KDF that has a slow but cryptographically
secure hashing function in its inner loop, which generally runs in
cache rather than out of external DRAM.  The thinking is that
read/writes of small 64-byte hashes randomly is inefficient for
external cheap DRAM, but quite efficient for cache.  Instead of having
several MiB of expensive on-chip cache for every guessing core, an
attacker simply interleaves the memory for many guesses in parallel.
For example, if the KDF does 64 bytes of memory read/write at a time
to 10MiB of on-chip cache, then an attacker can instead interleave
memory for 256 guesses in parallel into 16KiB blocks of memory and
store them in cheap external DRAM.  There would be 16KiB read from
external DRAM every time the KDF would normally read a 64-byte hash
from cache, so we stream memory in/out efficiently at near max speed.

Even a small slow FPGA can compute the 256 hashes in parallel easily
in the time it takes to load 16KiB of memory, so the memory bandwidth
becomes the main bottleneck.  Any time spent hashing data rather than
hammering the memory interface is time an attacker can simply subtract
from his password cracking time.  The hashing cores wouldn't even have
to wait for all 16KiB of memory to load, because the first core could
start it's hashing after the first 64 bytes are loaded.  This is a job
for an FPGA, and a custom ASIC isn't even particularly helpful.  An
Altera Stratix V FPGA can sustain 40GiB/s data rates to external DRAM
over 4 DDR3 lanes.  If a KDF read/writes 10MiB 6 times, that's 60MiB
of memory transfer.  That FPGA could do about 680 guesses per second
with just 4GiB of external DRAM.  If instead, that KDF did 1 GiB of
hashing, for 6GiB/sec of memory bandwidth, the FPGA could only do 6 to
7 guesses per second.

This means cache-timing-attach immune KDFs need as simple a hash
function as possible, and maybe they should do some hashing in
parallel, with SIMD and/or multiple threads to get their memory
bandwidth higher.  This is the best way to defend against brute-force
guessing attacks.

Bill

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