Date: Wed, 03 Sep 2014 12:52:56 -0300
From: Marcos Simplicio <mjunior@...c.usp.br>
To: discussions@...sword-hashing.net
Subject: Re: [PHC] Re: Tradeoff cryptanalysis of password hashing schemes


On 03-Sep-14 11:59, Bill Cox wrote:
> On 09/03/2014 10:30 AM, Dmitry Khovratovich wrote:
>> Some more details for the ASIC discussion.
> 
>> 1) An ASIC-equipped adversary will aim to minimize the running
>> costs, which on the long term will be dominated by the power
>> consumption and cooling.
> 
> I don't agree.
> 
> I have a simple on-paper ASIC attack assuming the attacker is going
> high-end, using Intel's same process as my Ivy Bridge processor.  In
> that case, with the expensive flip-chip packaging required for this
> power and GDDR5 interfaces, I estimated the cost of the ASIC at $350
> each in fairly high volume, similar to a reasonably high-end CPU made
> in this process.  I also estimated the 16GiB GDDR5 DRAM at $150, for a
> $500, plus another $100 for power supply and building a board.  I
> estimated the whole system power at about 118W, with 70W in the ASIC
> (similar to an Intel CPU), and the total cost of ownership for 5 years
> came out to about $1,100.
> 
> The power budge came out just under the hardware budget.  It's not
> clear to me that power is going to dominate, but it is a major
> component, sometimes over half, but not always.
> 
> The NRE for such a device is probably about $10M, so you'd better be
> buying several 10's of thousands of boards, preferably 100's of
> thousands.  This is really a government-scale attack.
> 
>> 2) A high-budget adversary will not restrict himself to
>> commercially available memory chips only, but will definitely
>> consider custom designs.
> 
> I agree, but only for government-scale attacks.  It's one thing to pay
> Intel enough cache to get your chip in their fab.  It's a very
> different thing to start mucking with their processor directly, which
> is their bread-and-butter.  Same goes for Samsung GDDR5 chips.
> 
>> 3) The memory power consumption (roughly) consists of retention
>> power (to sustain the state) and active energy (to read or write).
> 
>> 4) Regarding active energy, it would be natural to prefer a memory 
>> architecture that consumes 0.0001 J to read 1 Gbit (one of SRAM
>> designs - [1]) to the one that consumes 0.5J to read 1 Gbit
>> (DDR5).
> 
>> 5) I did not calculate the retention power for DDR5, but to match
>> [1] ( 0.1 W ) it must be around 3% of the maximum power
>> consumption, not speaking of 0.0001 W for the design [2].
> 
> If you think you have a better way to design 4GiB ultra-fast DRAM
> chips better than Samsung, be my guest, but I don't buy it.  Go pick a
> real commercial DRAM part, and use it's specs for your estimate,
> rather than guessing what you think they *should* be building.  Trust
> me, if they thought they could lower the power even 2X, and maintain
> the density and speed, they would!
> 
>> 6) There are other, low-power DRAM designs, that can be considered
>> here.
> 
> True, and some might have lower total cost of ownership per number of
> broken passwords.  It would require a lower-speed lower-power ASIC
> attack.  This might be more cost effective than the high-end attack
> I've been considering.  However, I doubt that the ASIC power will
> dominate, or the DRAM power will dominate, or the hardware cost will
> dominate, or the power cost will dominaate.  If any of those things
> were true, clever engineers would engineer a better solution.
> 
>> 7) Large on-chip memory is needed mainly to reduce the latency.
>> However, for the schemes currently attacked this is not a problem.
>> Catena has memory-independent addressing, and Lyra2 has huge blocks
>> sequentially stored in the memory. As a result, off-chip memory
>> with latency up to 10-15 cycles is still suitable for the tradeoff
>> attacks as the latency of the entire scheme remains pretty much the
>> same.
> 
> This is true for Catena, Lyra2, TwoCats, Yescrypt, and others.  It is
> not true for Argon, where a specially crafted cache architecture h
> speed up cache-bound hashing, which is what most Argon hashes would
> be.  Catena, based on the full Blake2b hash, would run slowly enough
> to make having on-chip cache pointless, but that's a Catena problem.

Just to be precise: in Lyra2 the blocks are just as huge or small as you
want them to be, since C (the number of columns per row) is a
user-defined parameter... In other words, it can be made as
cache-bounded as the user wants (be it a bad or a good thing)

> 
>> 8) If we consider DRAM-restrictive adversaries, then Lyra2 can be
>> run with 1/2 of memory with no energy penalty: the increase of
>> memory reads from 6 GB to 7.6 GB per password and 20% increase in
>> the running time is compensated by the 50% memory reduction. It may
>> even be that running Lyra2 with 1/2 of memory takes less energy
>> than with full memory.
> 
> I'll take a closer look at Lyra2 when I get to it's review.  I don't
> see this as a major problem for Lyra2, assuming these numbers are
> right.  

We have been working on finding tighter bounds to attacks against Lyra2
since the original submission, for different memory usages (not only
O(1)). I would like to confront your numbers (for T=1) with our results
(for any T), but it is not always easy to grasp all the details from a
presentation. Do you have an article or something similar that
accompanies the presentation?


Once Lyra2 is multi-threaded, it should easily max out the
> external memory bandwidth.  My high-end ASIC attack would not benefit
> from a 1/2 TMTO against a multi-threaded Lyra2, because it will be
> memory bandwidth limited against Lyra2, doing about 32X faster than my
> Ivy Bridge PC (12GiB/s banwidth for my PC vs 16X24GiB/s for my ASIC).
> 
> I would prefer some better compute-time hardening in Lyra2 though, for
> protection of very small memory hashes that do fit on an ASIC.

Since the latest discussions on the matter, I have been thinking more
seriously about testing a "multiplication hardened" underlying
permutation in Lyra2's sponge. There are some cryptographic schemes that
do use multiplications in their designs, so we will probably start there...

BR,

Marcos

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