Date: Wed, 12 Feb 2014 21:14:17 +0400
From: Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>
To: discussions@...sword-hashing.net
Subject: Re: [PHC] Interleaved attack on cache-timeing-resistant KDFs

On Tue, Feb 11, 2014 at 05:13:20PM -0500, Bill Cox wrote:
> 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,

I think there could be, for L2+ cache, if the cache-timing-attack immune
KDF has (pre-determined, mostly sequential) accesses with appropriate
locality of reference and exceeding off-chip RAM bandwidth.  I think
e.g. Catena could use sub-graphs for this purpose.

> and there is no
> significant gain for having a difficult to compute hash function (like
> my multiplication compute-time hardened hash function).

I think there could be, as this would tie up as much of attacker's
memory for about as much time (per hash computed).  Yes, even with a
pre-determined memory access pattern.

What we lose by going for a pre-determined memory access pattern is
preference for lower memory latency and efficient small lookups.
So e.g. a hypothetical unusually fast disk array would work just as well
as RAM for/against Catena, but not for/against scrypt.

> 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.

These are important, yes.  Sequential multiplies are also important.
Ideally, a defensive implementation would use both memory bandwidth and
multiplies at nearly the maximum speed the machine can support.

> 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.

Right.

However, note that we know from Litecoin that 128-byte lookups from
external RAM on GPU are actually quite efficient - as long as you can
have lots of them pending (like a GPU can), to hide the latency.
64-byte is not that much smaller.

Of course, Litecoin's 128 KB (and it's 64 KB with 2x TMTO, which the
miners use on GPU) is very little, which is what permits a lot of
instances to fit in GPU card's RAM and, in turn, permits for a lot of
pending lookups.  At YACoin's current 4 MB, the speed ends up being
CPU-like, and we'll see what it'll be with 8 MB soon.

So tying up significant amounts of memory per instance is important, for
multiple reasons.

> 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.

I agree, but throwing in some sequential multiplies is also helpful, as
long as this doesn't reduce defender's memory bandwidth usage.

Alexander

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