Date: Tue, 1 Apr 2014 20:44:59 -0400
From: Bill Cox <waywardgeek@...il.com>
To: discussions@...sword-hashing.net
Subject: Re: [PHC] On the topic of attacking designs, not authors

On Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 6:07 PM, Brandon Enright
<bmenrigh@...ndonenright.net> wrote:
> If you're concerned about picking on the AntCrypt author then skip
> ahead from A to O or some other letter :-)
>
> Brandon

I didn't skip ahead, but I finally got to OmegaCrypt.

First, I'm excited to see another author filling memory with something
other than the direct output of a cryptographic hash function.  That
alone puts OmegaCrypt among my favorites so far.

It kills me to see entries write H(mem[a] || mem[b]) to memory,
feeling that the cryptographic security of H improves their algorithm.
 I ... uh ... feel bad about picking on Catena, given how much they
seem to have inspired everyone, but publishing early means I know it
in much better detail than the others.  Catena memory is trivially
seen to be Catena data.  For the first row, just compute H(mem[i]) and
see if it's equal to mem[i+1].  If it is, bingo, non-random data,
probably Catena.  Why do they bother with the cryptographically secure
hash when they didn't secure memory?  A fast hash function more like
yours is the way to go, IMO.

Your scheme of calling different hashes depending pseudo-random values
is something I considered, and abandoned only due to increased
complexity.  It gives you another knob for improving the security of
your hash function without slowing it down.  Kudos!

I haven't read the whole paper.  It looks to me like it's susceptible
to cache timing attacks.  You may have mentioned it in your paper, but
I haven't finished it.  I like the way you padded the variable length
parameters.  I was doing the same until I found there seemed to be
little interest in this detail, partly because the block hash
functions all seem to do some padding for us.

I haven't read your security section, but your initial key derivation
seems ... what did that guy call it?  Strongly secure?  You hashed all
the inputs, including lengths, with no leaks around it.

I think my code will run faster per thread (a dumb benchmark I'm
tracking).  Solar Designer kept bugging me to improve it, so I did,
but my earlier code was more similar to this.  I think I may have just
spent more days on it... I started with a simpler PHS like this, but
then added features until I'd probably added too many.

Like Catena, your entry seems best when running in cache, and may be
able to get to a decent level of cache-bandwidth based runtime
hardness vs ASICs (faster than Catena, due to your non-cryptographic
memory hashing).  Unlike Bcrypt, you used enough memory to upset ASIC
attackers, since several MiB of cache isn't cheap.  Still, with an
entry this fast, yet cache bound, you'll either have to run a lot of
iterations, or avoid running for longer times, like a second.  Still,
I'd use something like this for quick cache bound key stretching.

So, pretty sweet entry overall, in my still somewhat ignorant opinion.
 I don't see any glaring goobers in a quick read.

Bill

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