phc-discussions - Re: [PHC] A review per day

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Message-ID: <1009353990.20140902223204@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 2 Sep 2014 22:32:04 +0200
From: Krisztián Pintér <pinterkr@...il.com>
To: discussions@...sword-hashing.net
Subject: Re: [PHC] A review per day - Schvrch

Thomas Pornin (at Tuesday, September 2, 2014, 10:16:30 PM):

> the SHA-3 competition, Keccak's hardware performance was a big selling
> point, making up for somewhat poor software performance. For PHC, we
> really want it to work the other way round.

i'm not sure about that. another example to consider would be
dedicated login servers. i can imagine for server with a large number
of logins, the password authentication becomes bottleneck. it can be
aided by a dedicated hashing hardware. so in fact, high performance
ASIC can be a friend too.

my point is: we need controlled hardness. we need to put much "good"
hardness, but avoid dropping in arbitrary random hardnesses just
because we can. a good password hash is efficient and lightweight,
while has a carefully chosen tunable cost.

ah, one more point. i'm also not sure that the attacker uses ASICs.
how about botnets? i'm pretty sure that besides some governments, the
biggest computing power on earth is a botnet accessing CPUs and GPUs.