Date: Sat, 30 Aug 2014 08:50:38 +0400
From: Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>
To: discussions@...sword-hashing.net
Subject: Re: [PHC] A review per day - TwoCats

On Fri, Aug 29, 2014 at 03:12:47PM -0400, Bill Cox wrote:
> On 08/28/2014 09:27 PM, Solar Designer wrote:
> > 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?
> 
> I haven't benchmarked bcrypt yet.  I don't know enough about the code
> to know if I'm running the latest SSE optimized version, etc.

There's no "SSE optimized version" of bcrypt, especially not for
defensive use, for good reasons.

> However, from the first run above, I'm doing 2.8B 16-byte random reads
> per second on Ivy Bridge.

Sounds pretty good, but there are more factors to consider.  You need to
compare the number of random reads per second when running the maximum
number of threads (for independent instances of TwoCats, and ditto for
bcrypt).  And you need to consider parallelism available in bcrypt vs.
in TwoCats - how soon are the results of those random reads required?

Here's a relevant posting I made when testing what became yescrypt:

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.security.phc/959/focus=1009

I've made some revisions to pwxform based on this kind of testing,
included in yescrypt as submitted.

> > 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).
> 
> I just looked at bcrypt again (your OpenWall version).  If I'm reading
> this accurately, it does 64 pseudo-random reads of 4 bytes each in
> each call to BF_ENCRYPT.

Yes.

> I don't see any writes to the S-boxes during
> the compute intensive phase.  Is that right?

No, it writes 8 bytes per BF_ENCRYPT.  Each iteration of the variable
cost loop starts with the S-boxes completely overwritten by the previous
iteration.

> I think a round should be doable in a clock cycle

Yes.

> without any memory accesses using an async SRAM,

You're the expert here.  I can only say that a round is doable in a
single clock cycle with memory accesses, as has been implemented in
FPGAs already.  The addresses may be computed at the beginning of this
cycle, or at the end of the previous cycle.  Yes, combining both
computation and memory lookups on the same cycle limits clock rate.
Some 2-cycle designs might be faster, if 2x more memory is available.

> or possibly even synthesizing the S-boxes to gates.

No, the S-boxes are variable and they keep changing.

> How fast does bcrypt do random reads?

According to that posting I referenced above, it's:

2176000*3072 = 6.7 billion/s per FX-8120 chip
2176000*493 = 1.1 billion/s with 1 instance (with other cores idle)

That's for defensive-use bcrypt code, which is what's relevant here.

So your "2.8B 16-byte random reads per second on Ivy Bridge" is very
good if it's for 1 thread, but not good enough if it's for entire chip.
And you also need to compare the available parallelism vs. bcrypt's.

> > As I had mentioned, the results of such testing were one of my
> > reasons to keep yescrypt's default pwxform rounds count no lower
> > than 6, or alternatively I'd need to reduce instruction-level
> > parallelism.  I think you did not include such criteria when
> > deciding on the amount of work to do along with the main arena
> > reads/writes in TwoCats.  You simply wanted to maximize your memory
> > bandwidth usage, well and the number of sequential MULs, which is
> > related, but not exactly it.
> 
> I did simply maximize bandwidth.  I did not worry about keeping the
> SIMD unit's pipeline full.  The penalty for CPUs without a SIMD unit
> would be too high, IMO.

That's true, which is why I need to make the instruction-level and SIMD
parallelism settings runtime tunable.

> SinnyCat, which is always single-threaded, hashes 1GiB in 0.23s, using
> no SIMD instructions at all (-m64 -mtune=generic).  TwoCats should run
> well on low-end CPUs.

Great!

Alexander

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