Date: Mon, 9 Feb 2015 15:38:02 +0200
From: Somitra Sanadhya <somitra@...td.ac.in>
To: discussions@...sword-hashing.net
Subject: Re: [PHC] PHC status report

Krisztian's comment makes me bring a few more issues on the discussion.

1. The document mentions that the decision was "Based on the discussions on
the public and private mailing lists ....". I am curious to know what were
the discussions in the "private mailing lists". Shouldn't they be in public
already ? Further, if the decision used these "private mailing lists", is
it not not unfair to the 2nd round candidate designs whose authors are not
in the panel ? Clearly, the panelists whose designs are advancing have some
more knowledge about the analysis which is not accessible to others.

2. One may expect that the selection of the 2nd round candidates was not
unanimous. If not, then how were the ties broken? Was it based on some kind
of voting ? If yes, then shouldn't this information be public as well (a la
the AES competition) ?

3. The comment on our design Rig is this: "Similar to Catena, but received
less attention (cf. bugs found in the specification and code)".

Is this single sentence doing any justice to the review ? In particular,
was it not the role of the panel to ensure that the submitted designs
receive fair evaluation ? Secondly, and more importantly, there was no
negative comment on Rig version 2. No bug was found in the specification or
the code for this version. The first version of Rig was replaced long ago
(mailed on this list on 30 Sept 2014), and the new version is the one which
was analyzed in one of the few publicly available and detailed analysis
here: http://eprint.iacr.org/2014/881 The first version of this report was
posted on the ePrint archive on 28-Oct-2014 19:17:39 UTC and was already
referring to the Rig version 2. Did the panel not look at ver. 2 of the
design at all ?

A cursory look at Table 4 in ePrint report 2014/881 should have convinced
the panel that they shouldn't dismiss a serious design by a single sentence
which is not even applicable to the current version of the submission.

[PS: The comments above are not from the Rig team. These are my personal
opinions and observations.]

Regards.
Somitra


On Mon, Feb 9, 2015 at 2:53 PM, Krisztián Pintér <pinterkr@...il.com> wrote:

> this is the actual information you based your decision on? i'm pretty
> sure one of you put this document together in one afternoon. i see no
> reason why would anyone hope to learn anything here after this. i can
> only hope the crypto community knows better than trusting a false
> sense of authority provided by an acronym (PHC), and chooses to ignore
> this non-information. if not, you are welcome to choose your own
> candidates as winners, and celebrate.
>
> On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 2:41 PM, Jean-Philippe Aumasson
> <jeanphilippe.aumasson@...il.com> wrote:
> > With our apologies for the delay:
> https://password-hashing.net/report1.html
>

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