phc-discussions - Re: [PHC] winner selection

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Date: Mon, 13 Apr 2015 15:35:42 +0000
From: Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell@...il.com>
To: discussions@...sword-hashing.net
Subject: Re: [PHC] winner selection

On Mon, Apr 13, 2015 at 3:11 PM, Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com> wrote:
> Makwa - likely select as a winner, but may need more pairs of eyes
> first, who would confirm they have actually reviewed Makwa.  I think
> Steve did?  Anyone else?  I didn't review it, and I think we have panel
> members who are more qualified to review it.  Makwa is a likely winner
> because it provides a unique feature with specific use cases for it,
> it looks good at first glance (but indeed that's not a proper review),
> and it comes from a particularly careful submitter.

Malkwa is near to my heart-- having a class of approach that I'm fond
of, but I think it would only be selected as a winner because it is
the only function of its type in the contest.

If I'd offered a Malkwa competitor it would have had information
theoretic security for delegation (in exchange for making some
tricks/performance worse). I suspect in the Bitcoin space we may
someday deploy something like Malkwa for some applications (in
particular; access keys for hardware wallets that don't have enough
computational power to perform meaningful hardening on their own), but
we'd only prefer it over more ordinary hardening functions if it
bought us information theoretic security, which allow worryfree
delegation of computation to completely untrusted parties.