Date: Tue, 2 Sep 2014 03:00:20 +0400
From: Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>
To: discussions@...sword-hashing.net
Subject: Re: [PHC] A review per day - PufferFish

On Mon, Sep 01, 2014 at 02:39:56PM -0400, Bill Cox wrote:
> On 09/01/2014 12:54 PM, Solar Designer wrote:
> > I guess the pre-hashing is needed to avoid a bcrypt-like password
> > length limit.  For bcrypt it's 72; while 144 would be much better
> > and would satisfy PHC requirements as-is (128+), it would still be
> > a drawback.
> 
> I'll take your word for this, but I don't understand!  The S-boxes are
> initialized with SHA512 data, and the password and salt are properly
> hashed with SHA512-HMAC in a way that avoids the HMAC input
> collisions.  What further pre-hashing could there be?

No, not "further".  I meant that the pre-hashing you referred to serves
the purpose of supporting almost arbitrarily long passwords, as opposed
to the limit there would be without such pre-hashing.  You wouldn't put
an arbitrarily long password into a fixed size P-box, nor into somewhat
limited size S-boxes.

[...]
> > CPU-based attacks may achieve some speedup by interleaving
[...]

> Also, to defend against attacker parallelism, using the whole L1 cache
> could be somewhat effective, since the S-box sizes are configurable.

Yes, however at least with yescrypt's L1 cache using code we saw only a
~10% slowdown per each doubling of S-box size (beyond L1 cache size),
whereas interleaving of 2 or 3 bcrypt instances provides a ~2x speedup.
If these numbers hold for Pufferfish, then using exactly L1 cache's size
provides only very limited defense against interleaving attacks on the
same CPU.  On the other hand, this would also mean that Pufferfish may
in fact reasonably exceed L1 cache size in defensive use.  But we really
need to run benchmarks of Pufferfish itself, at different S-box sizes,
rather than speculate.  The slowdown for it may be worse than the ~10%
per doubling I mentioned, because in my yescrypt tests there probably
was slightly more instruction-level parallelism available and the reads
were 128-bit rather than 64-bit.

> I should probably benchmark PufferFish, but I've got a ton of reviews
> to get through first.

Sure.  Please complete reviews of other PHC candidates first.  Thank you
for volunteering to do this!

> From the code, I suspect it performs on par
> with bcrypt in terms of unpredictable memory accesses per second.
> Because of this, and it's bcrypt-like simplicity, I'm currently
> picking PufferFish as my first choice for a pure bcrypt replacement,
> though not for an Scrypt replacement.  Being a bit slower on older
> machines is probably OK, IMO, given how long it will take for adoption.

OK.

I feel scrypt's SMix-like functionality could be reasonably added on top
of the existing bcrypt design, achieving maybe better results than
Pufferfish does (efficiency for out-of-cache accesses due to use of 4 KiB
blocks) at even lower code complexity than Pufferfish's and still using
the unmodified Blowfish rounds (yes, no 64-bitness then...)  It's almost
as simple as making writes in the 2^cost iterations loop go to further
memory locations rather than wrap around to the starting address, and
integerify()'ing the latest encrypted block to determine the new S-box
start address (within the region written so far) for lookups by the next
iteration of the variable-cost loop.  In this trivial bcrypt extension,
it'd be just one cost parameter controlling both time and memory; these
can be split with a bit of further magic.  The 72-character limit could
be dealt with in the same manner that BSDI's extended DES-based crypt()
did, without introducing another crypto primitive (that is, staying with
Blowfish only).  Should still be simpler and much closer to the original
bcrypt than Pufferfish is.  However, I did not find this good enough,
didn't have time (if I knew there would be bcrypt replacement
submissions that don't try to replace scrypt, maybe I would make time
for this), and I did not want to annoy the OpenBSD folks by a variation
of bcrypt (being too close to bcrypt proper, yet substantially
different), even though this would make sense technically (including for
their use).  Maybe I was wrong.  What this means in PHC context now, I'm
not sure.  It's late.  So probably nothing.

Alexander

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