phc-discussions - Re: [PHC] Best use of ROM in password hashing

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Date: Mon, 21 Apr 2014 09:44:15 -0400
From: Bill Cox <waywardgeek@...il.com>
To: discussions@...sword-hashing.net
Subject: Re: [PHC] Best use of ROM in password hashing

On Mon, Apr 21, 2014 at 6:50 AM, Bill Cox <waywardgeek@...il.com> wrote:

> Of the algorithms that support ROM, so far I only see yescrypt getting
> these details right.
>

I stated this too harshly.  Gambit uses ROM, and for an algorithm that does
no password dependent addressing, I see no flaw in the way it uses ROM, and
it is still better than my scheme of doing a single ROM read in parallel
with password hashing.  Predictable ROM reads might as well be sequential,
since we can always reorganize the ROM to be sequential if only predictable
addressing is done, and Gambit just reads it sequentially.

The down-side to predictable ROM addressing is that you can easily
distribute the ROM data in parallel to attack nodes, over and over again,
in sync with password hashing, so the ROM itself doesn't slow down an
attacker who has a high bandwidth connection between nodes.  Also, the ROM
cannot be larger than the RAM used in hashing.  I am not sure, but I think
this style of ROM would not slow down a GPU attack.

I remain a fan of password-dependent addressing, especially in a hybrid
architecture with a cache-timing resistant first loop.  Without password
dependent addressing, I think it is more important to have some runtime
hardening, with either multiplication chains, or maybe AESINC chains,
because we can always speed up predictable memory reads.

Bill

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