phc-discussions - Re: [PHC] Argon2 modulo division

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Date: Tue, 21 Apr 2015 05:16:04 +0100
From: Samuel Neves <sneves@....uc.pt>
To: discussions@...sword-hashing.net
Subject: Re: [PHC] Argon2 modulo division

On 04/21/2015 04:26 AM, Solar Designer wrote:
> Dmitry, all -
>
> It appears that Argon2 uses modulo division with arbitrary (and
> changing) divisors (usually not powers of 2).  Argon2d applies this to
> secret-dependent integers.  This is an extra source of timing leaks, on
> top of secret-dependent lookup addresses.
>
> Do we consider this a drawback?

As far as I can tell, the moduli themselves are not secret. Compilers know how to replace modulo reductions with
multiplications, shifts and subtractions---and it's faster too---so perhaps all such relevant contants can be
precomputed ahead of time (or, perhaps, computed concurrently with BLAKE2b rounds)? This, of course, does make
implementations more complex.