phc-discussions - Re: [PHC] Best use of ROM in password hashing

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Date: Sun, 20 Apr 2014 18:39:51 +0200
From: Krisztián Pintér <pinterkr@...il.com>
To: discussions@...sword-hashing.net
Subject: Re: [PHC] Best use of ROM in password hashing

Poul-Henning Kamp (at Sunday, April 20, 2014, 6:24:38 PM):

> Obviously there is a market opportunity here:  Sell batches of data
> media with identical copies of a random 1TB ROM.

reading this gave me an idea. what if we do the exact opposite?

what if we make a device that is slow to read. it would have many TBs
of data, but you could only read 1 bit at a time, and the device is so
slow, it takes 1ms to read that bit. and it would be not like
artificially throttled, but actually that slow. this ROM would be
completely un-copy-able. copying would take years, due to the low
speed.

such a device would make a perfect slow hashing ROM. you would read
random bits from it based on the password. the time factor would come
from the slowness of the device.