Date: Sun, 16 Feb 2014 11:45:19 -0500
From: Bill Cox <waywardgeek@...il.com>
To: discussions@...sword-hashing.net
Subject: KDF features?

What features are important for a competitive KDF?

Because of great feedback and new ideas from SolarDesigner, I'm
rewriting my NoelKDF password hasher to improve performance and
support more features.  The new KDF will be called TigerKDF, after my
other cat.

Features I currently plan on supporting in TigerKDF include:

- Selectable amount of compute time hardening with sequential
multiplication chains
- A fast non-cryptographic SSE/AVX2 friendly hash for the memory
hashing inner loop
- Parameter for reading/writing memory more than once to increase
bandwidth without increasing memory
- PBKDF2 initial password hash, after which an optional attempt can be
made to clear the password.
- Small Blake2 hashes between larger block hashes, and at the start and finish.
- Catena's "garlic" for client independent updates
- A first loop without password dependent addressing to protect
against cache timing attacks
- A second loop that does unpredictable password based addressing to
hurt attackers doing a TMTO
- User specified parallelism to increase memory bandwidth - any number
of memory hashing threads in parallel, which depend on hash results
from the multiplication chain to force them to keep memory loaded as
long as the multiplication chain takes to run
- Option to do lots of small unpredictable reads to hurt GPU
performance, similar to bcrypt
- Variable memory and block size to allow efficient hashing in small
caches, or huge external RAMs
- Method for initial password hashing for a specified time which
generates good values for multiplication chain length and amount of
memory to hash
- Support for server relief where the client does most of the hashing.
- Option to force memory from parallel threads to be loaded at the same time

How important are shared ROMs?  I suspect this would be useful on a
password authentication server in that the memory could be hashed
extensively, making it nearly impossible to do a useful TMTO against
it, and a password authentication server could reuse it for each
password hashed.

What can be added to better support GPU hashing?

Are there important features I've left out, or features I've included
that should be left out?

The tunables for TigerKDF include:

- Salt
- Memory size
- Block size
- Multiplication chain length
- Garlic (for client independent update)
- Repetitions (to increase bandwidth without increasing memory)
- Parallelism (number of memory hashing threads)
- Sub-block hashing size for small unpredictable memory accesses
- Boolean flag for enabling hashing between thread memory to force
them to be loaded simultaneously.  Is this needed?  I think it might
hurt GPU hashing if there is no way to disable this.  In NoelKDF, it's
always enabled.

Most of these could be set to reasonable defaults and would not have
to be stored with each password hash.  At a minimum, only the salt and
resulting hash would have to be stored.  In order of how useful it
would be to store with the password hash, I would include:

- Salt
- Garlic (for client independent updates)
- Memory size
- Parallelism
- Multiplication chain length
- Repetitions
- Block size
- Sub-block size

Thoughts?

Bill

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