phc-discussions - RE: [PHC] Best RNG for filling memory?

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Message-ID: <004901cf12e9$0b3227b0$21967710$@cfl.rr.com>
Date: Thu, 16 Jan 2014 13:30:33 -0500
From: "Gary W. Hvizdak" <gary.hvizdak@....rr.com>
To: <discussions@...sword-hashing.net>
Cc: <waywardgeek@...il.com>
Subject: RE: [PHC] Best RNG for filling memory?

On Wednesday 25 Dec 2013 at 1411, Bill Cox wrote . . .

"Second, I only used the salt to initialize the RNG, hoping that I could
better protect the password in case the large memory array got cached to
disk.  I'm not that comfortable having 1GB of MARC4 data out there to be
analyzed to try and guess the key. ... So, how do I force the entire memory
to depend on the password without risking some attack on the stream itself?
... Or would it be better just to keep the password from impacting what we
write to DRAM at all, and accept the improved attack?"

--

Hi Bill,

I'm a total newbie and am curious how/why "this" is of greater concern than
the password itself being swapped to disk?  Is it that only heap space ever
gets swapped whereas stack/local memory never does?

My current strategy for filling memory (subject to change) is the addition
of a "seed" parameter to PHC().  Kind of like a "pepper" except that it
wouldn't necessary need to be secret.  As you point out, an attacker need
only generate the fill pattern once.  However, if the amount of memory we
fill is sufficiently large, and well fill it quickly enough, the attacker
will still suffer some overhead to keep a second pristine copy on hand.
(I'm assuming memory will be modified as part of the "waking" process.)

Thanks,
Gary

P.S.  Although my scheme is not yet implemented, my seed parameter will be
combined with the salt and/or password in some way, to seed the PRNG that
ultimately fills memory.  This way at least an attacker will have to redo
the calculation for each password.