phc-discussions - Re: [PHC] Re: TwoCats multiplication chain

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Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2014 13:05:04 +0200
From: Thomas Pornin <pornin@...et.org>
To: discussions@...sword-hashing.net
Subject: Re: [PHC] Re: TwoCats multiplication chain

On Tue, Jun 24, 2014 at 11:03:48PM -0700, Alex Elsayed wrote:
> I wonder if it'd be feasible to piggyback on the push for GCM and use CLMUL 
> and its (prospective?) siblings on other architectures.

CLMUL implements a multiplication on GF(2)[X], i.e. "carryless
multiplication". If you try to implement it in hardware, you will find
it to be substantially simpler and faster than "normal" multiplication.
This is why people working on hardware acceleration of elliptic curves
really prefer binary curves (on GF(2^m)) over prime curves (on GF(p)
with p prime).

Strangely enough, on modern 64-bit x86 CPU which implement CLMUL, the
64x64->128 multiplication with carries is still faster than its
carryless counterpart. This is due to the former being much more
thoroughly optimized, and, in particular, using up a lot more
transistors within the CPU.

Since, for password hashing, we want code which is faster on a PC than
on a FPGA, we should build up on operations that work best on a PC and
worst on a FPGA. From this point of view, using CLMUL looks like a
not-so-good idea.

	--Thomas Pornin