phc-discussions - Re: [PHC] Combining sliding window and bit-reversal

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Date: Tue, 28 Jan 2014 03:22:48 +0400
From: Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>
To: discussions@...sword-hashing.net
Subject: Re: [PHC] Combining sliding window and bit-reversal

On Tue, Jan 28, 2014 at 02:23:40AM +0400, Solar Designer wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 27, 2014 at 04:54:27PM -0500, Bill Cox wrote:
> > I was comparing Catena-3 graphs to Alexander's power-of-two graphs,
> > and both did well in different areas.  Then I though, how about
> > combining them?  So, instead of picking random locations within the
> 
> By "random locations", do you mean secret-dependent (leaky) or not?
> 
> > sliding window, I pick bit-reversal based locations.  This results in
> > the hardest to pebble DAGs so far for my pebbling algorithm.
> 
> This is good news.  I was going to try the same for the cache timing
> resistant portion of computation in escrypt.
> 
> It is curious (and unexpected by me) that bit reversal is better than
> "random" permutation.  I thought of also trying e.g. TEA block cipher at
> changing block size (to match the current sliding window size) and very
> low round count as an alternative to bit reversal.  It could be
> implementable in roughly as many instructions as bit reversal on CPUs
> lacking a bit reversal instruction.

Oh, I guess by "picking random locations" Bill meant not a random
permutation, but rather scrypt-like random lookups.  Then a reason why a
bit reversal (or some random permutation) may work better (in certain
ways) is that it accesses all indices (just in a different order),
rather than merely ~63% of them.  If so, TEA and the like are also worth
trying.  And yes, it is trivial to revise TEA for arbitrary block size,
including odd bit sizes (where the two "halves" differ in size by 1 bit).

Speaking of bit reversal instructions, it appears that we still don't
have them on x86, not even with planned extensions.  Yet there are such
instructions e.g. on ARM, Epiphany, AMD GCN (both scalar and vector).

To be more x86-friendly, something crazy like a variable block size
Feistel cipher using CRC-32 (one instruction on modern x86) as the F
function might work better.  e.g. 2 rounds might be enough.  Drawback:
complexity.

Of course, normally this operation won't significantly affect overall
performance, but at low r (in scrypt terms) it may be measurable, and in
some cases even r=1 could make sense (perhaps on different hardware
setups, though? so x86 might be irrelevant).  It just feels bad to waste
cycles on what would be a no-op in ASIC.

I am just thinking aloud.

Alexander