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

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Date: Sun, 14 Sep 2014 12:54:18 +0400
From: Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>
To: discussions@...sword-hashing.net
Subject: Re: [PHC] A review per day - Battcrypt

On Sat, Sep 13, 2014 at 02:41:24PM -0400, Bill Cox wrote:
> However, in it's current form, it's too slow.

If we expect typical defensive implementations of battcrypt to be from
scripting languages (yet using their native Blowfish), this isn't
necessarily bad.  It provides some defense against attacks with native
code implementations on CPU.  Ideally, both scripting and native would
run fast, but if we can't have the scripting language implementations to
run faster, maybe we also don't want fully native ones to run faster.

A drawback is that it makes battcrypt rather short-lived (a few years?) -
it's only useful until bcrypt or some PHC winner (other than battcrypt)
becomes universally available in currently relevant versions of PHP, etc.
Frankly, this is probably already the case for bcrypt, as web apps are
about to proceed to drop support for older versions of PHP anyway.

> These numbers are *way* too high for competing with Scrypt in large
> memory hashing.  However, for strong GPU defense in small memory,
> Battcrypt is great, just like PufferFish and bcrypt.  I tried to see
> if I could tweak the code to get it to be speed competitive with the 3
> potential Scrypt replacements, but I failed.  I reduced the encryption
> rounds from 16 to 1, and that helped a lot, and I got rid of the early
> garlic rounds and only computed the last one, but it was still too
> slow.

I think reducing the number of Blowfish rounds defeats the point of
using battcrypt anyway.  battcrypt is primarily to be implemented using
a scripting language's calls to a native implementation of Blowfish, so
it usually won't be able to tweak the Blowfish rounds count.

Alexander