phc-discussions - Re: [PHC] Are password trailing 0's a problem?

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Date: Fri, 7 Mar 2014 19:20:49 -0500
From: Bill Cox <waywardgeek@...il.com>
To: discussions@...sword-hashing.net
Subject: Re: [PHC] Are password trailing 0's a problem?

On Fri, Mar 7, 2014 at 6:45 PM, Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com> wrote:
> BTW, Bill's choice of BLAKE2 for the sole cryptographic primitive, while
> sound technically, may be problematic for some prospective users.

Good point.  I just read a bit more about SHA3, and it sounds like I
might get more acceptance using Blake2...

Maybe I should just plug SHA-256 back in like I had before, just for
the hashing at the start and finish.

>> ISTM that it
>> would be embarrassing for the PHC winner to have less resistance to
>> generic attacks than a hash function should provide.
>
> I agree.  So I am thinking of a suitably minimal change to scrypt's use
> of PBKDF2 so that the two problems pointed out in this thread today
> would not affect escrypt (except in scrypt compat mode).  Unfortunately,
> those minimal changes feel hackish.  For example, I could XOR the
> least significant byte of password length into each derived key block
> after the initial PBKDF2 call.  How does this sound to you?  (One byte
> should be enough since it contains all the info that is otherwise lost
> with padding.  And there's no endianness issue.)
>
> Alexander

I get a wiggy feeling now when stuff gets XORed together and then use
the result directly, after Steve's attack on my original NoelKDF
function, and after reading about the PBKDF2 chosen c attack which is
only possible because they XORed results together.  XORing in the
length is simple, but I might just go ahead and do the work of using
Init, Update, and Finalize and hash in the input length directly.

Bill