Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2014 02:55:56 +0400
From: Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>
To: discussions@...sword-hashing.net
Subject: Re: [PHC] not bossy

Per, Jeremi -

That's a very nice selection of topics!  Somehow I didn't expect there
would be so much PHC-related material at Passwords14 LV.

On Mon, Jun 23, 2014 at 11:31:50PM +0200, Per Thorsheim wrote:
> Steve 'Sc00bz' Thomas
> Bitslice DES with LOP3.LUT

Steve, I guess you're already aware of this, but in case not: we're also
going to have this instruction in AVX-512, it's called
VPTERNLOGD/VPTERNLOGQ there.  I learned about it from Samuel Neves in
February.  I also found this table now:

http://sandpile.org/x86/ternlog.htm

I think we should ask for it to be added to next revision of Epiphany,
too, although only a 3-operand form fits in 32 bits comfortably (18 bits
for 3 registers, 8 bits for truth table, and 6 bits for opcode).

For historical related work, you could take a look at and maybe refer to
DES crackers (plain DES, not descrypt) for UltraSPARC from RSA's DES
challenges in late 1990s.  UltraSPARC VIS implements all 16 binary
bitwise ops (10 non-trivial and 6 trivial), and there were DES cracking
clients for distributed.net (and for competing networks before
distributed.net became a definitive winner in terms of computing power)
that actually implemented bitslice DES using these VIS instructions.
I don't know whether they simply used the subset usable with Matthew
Kwan's nonstd.c, or if they actually made some/much use of the extra
instructions (maybe only those easily seen from adjacent operations in
nonstd.c?)  IIRC, a hurdle was that Solaris of the time would clobber
high 32 bits of 64-bit integer registers on context switches (the kernel
was 64-bit, but userland 32-bit), so those DES cracker clients for
Solaris had to detect such clobbering and restart the last iteration
(retest the last group of keys).  The floating-point registers that VIS
worked on were immune from that, but IIRC the clients used both integer
registers (with restricted set of bitwise ops) and floating-point
registers (with all 16 binary bitwise ops available via VIS), perhaps
for higher instruction issue rate.

A hurdle for bitslice DES, etc. is that the more types of gates you
have, the higher the complexity of the optimization task is.  While
arriving at the absolute lowest gate count (and having any sort of
certainty of that) is already intractable for DES S-boxes even with few
gate types, an interesting question is whether we likely get closer or
stay farther away from that holy grail in practice when we have more
gate types.  (Another detail is that, of course, lowest gate count does
not necessarily lead to the highest possible speed on actual hardware,
where other factors such as parallelism and register pressure play a
role too.)

I have no doubt that even with relatively simple approaches the gate
count can be reduced (and speed increased), as compared to what we're
getting with bitselect.  I guess you already have specific numbers?

I am looking forward to seeing your slides and talk video (I won't be at
Passwords14 LV in person, unfortunately).

Thanks,

Alexander

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