Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2014 22:13:17 -0700
From: Raullen Chai <raullenchai@...il.com>
To: discussions@...sword-hashing.net
Subject: Re: [PHC] A review per day, starting with Yarn

Thanks for bringing up this, Bill. I definitely vote for the idea of
"one-review-per-day". Maybe after the first round of the review, we
could focus on fewer candidates and do another round of
"one-review-per-week" and so on.

Yearn has aroused my interest too.

I agree that m_step should be reasonably small to maximize the memory
access rate, or t_cost should be reasonably large, e.g., t_cost  >
(2^m_cost) * (m_step), to ensure that every entry of memory can be
accessed at least once. In addition, I feel like the memory should be
involved in blake2b_process too; otherwise, the attacker can focus on,
e.g., exhaustive search, the state before blake2b_process if it is
significantly smaller than memory.

Besides, I think "par" is an interesting parameter in this algorithm
that is tricky to choose because of the rotate_state function below
which transforms "state[0 .. N]" to "state[1 .. par - 1] || state[0]
|| state[par .. N]". Basically we should avoid to choose all small
values of par.

static void rotate_state(uint8_t (*state)[16], size_t par) {
  uint8_t tmp[16];
  memcpy(tmp, state[0], 16);
  memmove(state[0], state[1], 16 * (par - 1));
  memcpy(state[par - 1], tmp, 16);
}


-Raullen Chai



On Tue, Aug 26, 2014 at 6:22 PM, Bill Cox <waywardgeek@...hershed.org> wrote:
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> I have some notes on all of the entries, and I am thinking of going
> through them one at a time for discussion, one per day.  I was
> thinking reverse alphabetical order would be more fair, since we tend
> to pick on candidates starting with A more than those starting with T,
> for example.
>
> So, if anyone is interested in this idea, I'll carry it forward.  For
> the next 24 hours, I'd like to discuss Yarn.
>
> The author of Yarn is clearly a genius.  We have a lot of those around
> here.  The code is awesome.  In 280 lines he encoded both AES and
> blake2b, in addition to his algorithm!  I was blown away when I read it.
>
> However, I'm not sure the Yarn author understands the password hashing
> problem in as much detail as he should.  The biggest problem I have
> with Yarn is this loop:
>
>         for (i = 0; i < t_cost; i++) {
>                 if (i % m_step == m_step - 1) {
>                         size_t idx = integerify(addr, m_cost);
>                         for (j = 0; j < 16; j++) {
>                                 addr[j] = memory[idx][j] ^ state[1 %
> par][j];
>                         }
>                         memcpy(memory[idx], state[1 % par], 16);
>                         aesenc(state[0], addr);
>                 } else {
>                         uint8_t tmp[16];
>                         memcpy(tmp, state[1 % par], 16);
>                         aesenc(state[0], tmp);
>                 }
>                 rotate_state(state, par);
>         }
>
> In short, it says to do AES encryption steps, but only write to memory
> once every m_step steps.  IIRC, m_step is 72 by default, meaning Yarn
> trickles out data at a pathetic pace, which is totally contrary to
> memory hard security.
>
> Other gripes I have are:
>
> - - it has to have a very high t_cost to avoid TMTO.  With t_cost < 72,
> no memory is over-written at all.  On the other 71, no memory is read
> either.
> - - with small memory reads pseudo-randomly through memory, it will run
> slowly in external memory, at least once the m_step being 72 problem
> is fixed.
>
> The guy who posted Yarn showed up for a couple emails and left.  Maybe
> he's just onto his next gig, but I feel like this guy has amazing
> coding skills, and could knock security algorithms out of the park, if
> he would just engage and learn a bit about what we need.
>
> Bill
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-- 
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Best Regards
(Raullen) Qi Chai

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