Date: Fri, 7 Mar 2014 06:45:52 +0400
From: Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>
To: discussions@...sword-hashing.net
Subject: Re: [PHC] TigerKDF paper and code ready for review

On Thu, Mar 06, 2014 at 07:12:27PM -0500, Bill Cox wrote:
> I still have to do a bit of work on the paper, but it's nearly ready:
> 
>     http://waywardgeek.net/TigerKDF.pdf
> 
> The code is on github and can be checked out with:
> 
>     git clone git://github.com/waywardgeek/tigerkdf.git
> 
> I suspect TigerKDF, my 3rd major rewrite in 2 months, may be
> competitive.

I think it is competitive.

I didn't fully read the paper yet, but here's some criticism, which I
hope might make TigerKDF and/or the paper better:

> * Fills and hashes memory rapidly - 1/2 as fast as memmove

Cool.  Somehow in the paper you give GB/s figures for scrypt when
running a single thread only.  Why don't you mention that when running
as many threads as there are logical CPUs, meaning 8 on a currently
typical quad-core CPU, optimized scrypt code (such as in escrypt, and I
think also floodyberry's) processes 8 GiB in 2.4 seconds, which means
6.7 GiB/s (considering that memory is first written and then read back),
or >1/4 of theoretical peak memory bandwidth on those machines?  In fact,
a trivial change to scrypt - reducing the Salsa20 round count to 2 -
makes scrypt faster yet, perhaps as fast as TigerKDF when you run enough
threads.  This may well be a baseline to compete against, since you need
to justify the major differences vs. that 3-line change (e.g., in
escrypt's crypto_scrypt-sse.c it's a matter of deleting 3
SALSA20_2ROUNDS lines, leaving just one).

In terms of memory bandwidth, TigerKDF may have advantage in that it
achieves high memory bandwidth usage at lower thread counts, which means
at lower parallelism.  As we know, excessive parallelism benefits some
attackers, so this property of TigerKDF may be good.  You may brag about
that. :-)  On the other hand, bumping into memory bandwidth way sooner
than we've put all of the suitable CPU execution units to use makes us
more vulnerable to attacks on _some_ future CPU-based systems where
balance _might_ be shifted towards higher memory bandwidth (then the
attacker will be able to run more instances in parallel, for different
candidate passwords).

I think it is best to stay balanced in terms of all of: memory bandwidth
usage, CPU usage, and multiply time hardness.  e.g. bumping into one of
these while using 80% of the other two is great, whereas bumping into one
of these while using <50% of one or both of the other two is not as good.
And yes, this may require tunable parameters (you might already have
enough of them to allow for such tuning).

> * Provides strong defense against GPU, FPGA, and ASIC attacks

I'm afraid the defense against GPUs is still not as strong as you claim
it is.  You compare TigerKDF's 64-byte random lookups against bcrypt's
16-byte lookups - but bcrypt actually does 4 independent 4-byte lookups
per round.  This difference is subtle in that the 4 lookups may proceed
in parallel, but it is crucial in requiring use of local memory for
optimal performance on current GPUs, vs. use of off-chip memory (where
entire cache lines would be fetched, which is too wasteful for 4-byte
lookups, but is 4x less inefficient for 16-byte ones).  Specifically,
bcrypt $2a$05 cracking using local memory runs at ~4k c/s on HD 7970
(925 MHz), whereas using global memory it slows down to ~2k c/s.  From
these numbers, I'd expect ~8k c/s (4 times the ~2k c/s it gets with
global memory) if it made 16-byte lookups instead of 4x 4-byte lookups.
In other words, it'd be roughly twice faster per-chip on that GPU than
on its contemporary quad-core CPUs (which deliver ~5k c/s).  Increasing
this further to 64 bytes would give ~32k c/s, or 8 times faster than
original, and the increase from 4 KiB to 32 KiB that you claim should
prevent this actually would not, because at these lookup sizes we're
talking global memory, which we have lots of (compared to either 4 KiB
or 32 KiB).  In fact, this gets close to and is consistent with
Litecoin's 128-byte lookups, which also use global memory fine.  Yes, in
Litecoin the lookup results are not needed as soon, but when we're using
global memory this difference is unimportant (as long as we have enough
extra global memory), because the latencies are hidden by having lots of
extra concurrent instances.

Now, I understand that it's wasteful to do lookups smaller than 16 bytes
e.g. on Sandy Bridge and better (where we can do two 16-byte lookups
from L1 cache per cycle, or only the same number of smaller lookups).
Good news: to be as GPU-resistant as bcrypt, you don't need your lookups
to be as small as bcrypt's.  Rather, you need them to be as rapid as
bcrypt's, with results required as soon as bcrypt does, and with no more
parallelism than bcrypt has.  (These last two conditions are actually
one.)  It is not a problem per se if an implementation turns out to be
more efficient using global rather than local memory, as long as the
accesses are as rapid as bcrypt's.  Those conditions imply that it won't
run faster than bcrypt, using either type of memory.  So your comparison
of GPU resistance vs. bcrypt's compares the wrong thing.  Now, if your
random lookup results are not required as soon as bcrypt does require
them (meaning you have more parallelism in one instance), you may in
fact compensate for that by making the random lookups arena larger.

BTW, why do you mention 32 KiB there?  Your random lookups arena is
only 16 KiB, and you can't make it larger than that on current CPUs with
32 KiB L1d cache and 2 hardware threads/core, without incurring much
extra L1 cache thrashing.  TigerKDF's total memory usage is irrelevant.
In other words, you may compensate for up to 4x more latency tolerance or
parallelism than bcrypt has.  But you can't necessarily compensate for
less frequent lookups (make them 2x+ less frequent than bcrypt's, and
use of global memory becomes beneficial on HD 7970, regardless of lookup
size).  I am fighting with the same problem in escrypt.  It's tough,
especially when we consider running on smaller SIMD-less CPUs with
settings that are also good for SIMD-enabled CPUs.  I'm afraid this
combination of desirable properties - common settings for SIMD-less and
SIMD-enabled (up to certain sane vector width), yet GPU resistance no
worse than bcrypt's - is just not possible.  Have to tune for SIMD-less
and SIMD-enabled separately if we don't accept giving up on having GPU
resistance no worse than bcrypt's.

Another aspect (I had mentioned before but didn't emphasize enough) is
that while you need something like a 16 KiB small random lookup arena
for the anti-GPU lookups, it is excessive for the higher-level scrypt-like
lookups.  I think it is actually undesirable to make these higher-level
lookups that large.  scrypt paper recommends r=8 for a reason: just high
enough to amortize the overhead of TLB misses.  In my testing, I mostly
use values of r between 5 and 8 (thus, 640 to 1024 bytes).  Yes, I could
get slightly higher memory bandwidth with higher r, but then there's
less of a dependency on the memory being the fairly low latency RAM that
we have in typical defender's systems.  An attacker would gain extra
flexibility in using other types of memory, including e.g. SSDs or
combined RAM of multiple machines.  I don't know how much of an issue
this is going to be in practice (might be a non-issue, I admit).  I think
this issue is more relevant when there's a ROM lookup table that might
not fit in a certain attack node's RAM, so more relevant to some use
cases for escrypt than to TigerKDF.

> 8. Inter-thread memory hashing to thwart TMTOs (Solar Designer)

In another message, you mentioned you introduced multiple thread syncs
per hash computation.  Why?  I think it is best to have just one more
than scrypt does (so 2 instead of 1).  Each threads sync is potentially a
huge performance loss when the system is under other load (overbooked),
which is a common occurrence on servers (OK, perhaps they should fully
avoid "our" threads anyway, using solely their own coming from nearly
concurrent authentication attempts).

I am sorry for providing solely the criticism.  I actually like many
things about TigerKDF, naturally. ;-)  It's just that saying "I like
this" about specific things is probably less helpful (unless you were
going to drop any of the good things, which I think you are not).

Thanks!

Alexander

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