Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2014 11:29:01 +0400
From: Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>
To: discussions@...sword-hashing.net
Subject: Re: [PHC] attacking and hardening escrypt

On Sun, Mar 09, 2014 at 07:04:29AM +0400, Solar Designer wrote:
> Somehow I am especially interested in comments from Steve Thomas
> (@Sc00bzT) and Christian Winnerlein (@CodesInChaos), please. ;-)
> Indeed, I'd appreciate anyone else's comments as well.

This is still true. ;-)

> Now, this attack appears to be defeated by moving away from XORs to a
> _suitable_ non-associative operation (e.g., subtraction is _not_ suitable,
> still allowing for a similar attack, so non-associativity alone is not
> sufficient), or to alternating sufficiently different operations.  Would
> it be sufficient to alternate XORs and ADDs for even and odd sub-blocks?
> (I think so.)  Is this change worth making (drawback: adds complexity),
> or is it best to stipulate that S_ROUNDS is at least 1 and define the
> sub-block transformation such that it can't be precomputed out of order
> with the sub-block XORs (or in other words without having the actual
> input values to it yet), or is it best to do both of these things (harden
> for the case of S_ROUNDS = 0, yet require S_ROUNDS > 0)?  I think the way
> the sub-block transformation is currently defined satisfies this property
> (for S_ROUNDS > 0).
> 
> This gives us a requirement for the sub-block transformation function.
> Further requirements are that it must not significantly reduce entropy,
> nor introduce significant biases - although these appear to be less
> important.  Are there any other requirements?

More required properties:

If the sub-block transformation uses multiple rounds per sub-block
(S_ROUNDS > 1), there shouldn't exist a practical way to compute
multiple rounds with significantly less effort or significantly quicker
(in terms of latency) than with sequential computation of the individual
rounds given a particular input to the first round.

Both individual and multiple rounds at once may be computable faster
with a lookup table.  To thwart this, the lane width should be large
enough that the table would need to be unrealistically big, or/and extra
variable inputs to the round function may be used.  In escrypt, the lane
width is 64-bit, and the extra inputs are the S-boxes, which depend on
the password and salt.  So both the table would need to be
unrealistically big and it'd need to be recomputed for each password and
salt combination.

Can smaller lookup table(s) be used efficiently (along with some
computation), such as applied to a portion of the lane width only?  This
depends on how the round function is defined.  For example, could our
64-bit lane width be decomposed into 4 16-bit lanes, with only trivial
enough mixing between them that 4 16-bit lookup tables could be used
efficiently?  (The 4x 16-bit split is arbitrary, used for the sake of
providing a specific example with lookup tables that are small enough to
be practical.)  I think not, but this is a concern to keep in mind when
revising the round function.

Also, I've been seriously considering using 32-bit lanes.  (This has
some pros and cons.  Among the pros is better compatibility with Salsa20,
where it'd let us ignore SIMD shuffling of 32-bit words.  escrypt
currently has some extra complexity because of this shuffling, yet
having its new sub-block mixing work on 64-bit lanes.)  I think that
with careful design and with use of the variable S-boxes, 32-bit lanes
would be OK in terms of issues described above, but they'd provide a
smaller safety margin.  (Luckily, we're not talking cryptographic
security here, but just attacks that would allow for computation of the
hash with somewhat less resources than intended.)

> BTW, this is similar to the question Bill Cox asked a few months ago,
> and got no real answers to.  My answer was: depends on context.  I do
> provide the context to my question now (it's escrypt 0.3.1 that I posted
> the other day, or/and the explanation above for those too busy to read
> the code), and my opinion on required properties - and I'd appreciate
> comments from others in this community.  Thanks!

Alexander

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