Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2014 00:02:45 +0400
From: Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>
To: discussions@...sword-hashing.net
Subject: Re: [PHC] Best use of ROM in password hashing

On Mon, Apr 21, 2014 at 01:58:49PM -0400, Bill Cox wrote:
> Here's another N-way ROM splitting attack, and this one should work for
> *any* PHS using ROM, regardless of how much RAM is hashed.  The goal is to
> decrease the cost of the ROM to the attacker per guessing node while
> maintaining good ROM bandwidth per node.  An attacker simply splits the ROM
> into N pieces, and builds a fast permutation network to route from the N
> pieces to say N/2 computation nodes.  During any block read loop, most of
> the N/2 cores could have lone access to the ROM data they need.  The cost
> of the permutation network is O(N*log(N)), so N should be chosen to keep
> the permutation network's cost well under the cost of N ROMs.

Sure.  This is why I call this ROM-port-hardness.  The attacker's cost
is in number of ROM ports (and routing, and the remaining ROM size per
compute core).  You use N ports and you incur the expected cost.

http://www.openwall.com/presentations/ZeroNights2012-New-In-Password-Hashing/mgp00008.html

"Moreover, those don't have to be ports to the same large ROM - instead,
separate smaller ROM banks may be used as long as bank conflicts are
fairly rare" as that slide says.  You have just that, and you reduce the
frequency of "bank conflicts" by using N/2 attack nodes for N ROMs.

The slide also explains why the ROM is beneficial anyway (just not in
the same way and not to the same extent as scrypt's RAM):

"Yet at below ~1000 cores sharing a ROM the attack speed per die area
will be lower than for scrypt, whereas with more cores the attacker will
have to provide more interconnect and ROM ports, which will have a cost
of its own"

The ~1000 cores threshold comes from numbers given on the previous
slide, comparing ROM and RAM sizes that are currently practical for mass
user authentication:

http://www.openwall.com/presentations/ZeroNights2012-New-In-Password-Hashing/mgp00007.html

Also note that the defender benefits from the same property too, just to
a smaller extent.  The ROM is shared between defender's threads too.
For currently practical hardware, we share a 112 GiB ROM (can be made 2
or 4 times larger than that on the same hardware platform, if desired)
between 32 hardware threads on 16 physical cores.  scrypt-like memory
usage during mass user authentication is many orders of magnitude lower,
so we're comparing the die area of those ~1000 crypto cores and/or ~1000+
ROM ports + routing vs. that of just ~128 MiB of RAM (e.g., 4 MiB times
32 threads).  If our ~1000 crypto cores and/or ~1000+ ROM ports +
routing add to that die area significantly, the use of ROM is
worthwhile, even against ASIC attackers.

> I really don't see any good way to prevent an attacker from making use of
> parallel small ROMs and some data routing hardware, so counting on the cost
> of the ROM and it's bandwidth limitations as primary deterrents may not
> work out well.

Yes, many of the costs associated with ROMs are not per attack node.
Yes, they fundamentally differ from e.g. scrypt's area-time costs.  They
don't buy us as much defense, by far.  But for intended use cases,
there's a huge constant factor in our favor, estimated at around 1000
for current needs on currently practical defenders' hardware.  I think
this constant factor makes all the difference, making those otherwise
relatively small costs of crypto cores, ROM ports, routing stand out
(likely exceed scrypt-like RAM cost that we can afford).

> It doesn't hurt to add those to a defender's array of
> defenses, but the primary time*cost is likely to be due to the memory
> hashing algorithm.

It is unclear to me where the primary cost for attackers will be.  We're
comparing very different things here.  My guesstimate is that for the
numbers given above, the area-time cost associated with ROMs will exceed
that associated with RAMs.

> I think Alexander enjoys adding more spikes in his
> defense wall, and ROM cost and bandwidth are just two more the attacker
> will have to overcome.  If I were an attacker looking at a full blown
> Yescript (with the enhancements Alexander has mentioned), I'd just throw up
> my hands and go hack accounts somewhere else :-)

Oh, actually I think you'd treat this as a challenge. :-)

Alexander

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