phc-discussions - Re: [PHC] Initial hashing function. Feedback welcome

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Date: Tue, 31 Dec 2013 11:48:39 -0500
From: Bill Cox <waywardgeek@...il.com>
To: discussions@...sword-hashing.net
Subject: Re: [PHC] Initial hashing function. Feedback welcome

On Mon, Dec 30, 2013 at 8:42 PM, Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com> wrote:

> > - 2048 rounds of PBKDF2_SHA256 are used at the start to generate an
> > intermediate derived key.
>
> I dislike this.  It's very wasteful in use cases where our total running
> time is very limited.  This may be all running time we can afford (if at
> all), not leaving any time for the memory-hard portion.
>

I made the number of SHA-256 rounds selectable, from 1 up.

I don't think I described the purpose of the sha256 rounds very well.  2048
rounds takes 2.5ms on my linux box using scrypte's sha256.c for
PBKDF2-SHA256 key derivation.  If I do this and then clear the password,
the plaintext password is only there for 2.5ms.

After that, I do a huge memory hash, and I feel it is common for this sort
of memory hog of a process  get swapped out (if mlock is disabled or not
working or available).  Maybe other processes will be swapping and the
whole thing is so slow that the user closes his laptop, and hibernation
writes out the contents of RAM to SSD, where files aren't even erased if
you overwrite them with 0's.  By doing that 2.5ms of key derivation as a
pre-process, which is tiny compared to the 1s-ish desired for a strong KDF,
we make it harder for an attacker to discover the password.  Even if he
extracts the intermediate derived key, he'll need a decent graphics card to
get enough speed to brute-force attack a password which is protected with
2048 rounds of SHA256.  With custom hardware, the 2048 rounds provides
essentially zero protection, but how many password crackers out there have
such custom hardware?  Surely the NSA, but hopefully not many scammers.  My
personal preference would be to devote about 1% of the key hashing time to
this task, which on my machine would be 8192 rounds.

There's a lot of talk about not writing data derived from the password data
to memory to avoid such an attack, but I've convinced myself that we have
to write password-derived data to memory to build a memory-hard KDF, There
seems to be no way around it.  I prefer for that data to be somewhat safe -
not NSA safe, but average-joe cracker safe.

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