Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2014 06:19:00 +0400
From: Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>
To: discussions@...sword-hashing.net
Subject: Re: [PHC] A review per day - TwoCats

Bill,

On Fri, Aug 29, 2014 at 05:27:28AM +0400, Solar Designer wrote:
> OK, you asked for it.  I don't recall all of my complaints about TwoCats
> anymore, but I think its small random lookups, which are meant to be
> bcrypt-like, might not actually provide as much GPU resistance as
> bcrypt's did.  I think TwoCats makes them 256-bit only, meaning that on
> pre-AVX2 CPUs they might not be frequent enough, and you might not be
> making enough of them per byte read/written to the large arena.  Have
> you actually checked TwoCats vs. defense-optimized bcrypt running on the
> same CPU when exhausting the machine's capacity (e.g., 8 independent
> concurrent hash computations on your i7-3770), in terms of frequency of
> those small random lookups?  And then you need to factor in how soon
> their results are needed (the available parallelism, compare it against
> bcrypt's four S-box lookups) and the total size of your equivalent of
> bcrypt S-boxes (if 4x larger, then you probably have 4x more room for
> parallelism while staying the same as bcrypt in terms of GPU resistance).

... or not so much room, since global memory attacks become a concern
when lookups are less frequent and/or parallelism is higher, and these
are not affected by S-box size (until it becomes many times larger than
our L1 cache, so not in our case).

Alexander

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