Message-ID: <551995BF.7090608@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 30 Mar 2015 20:28:15 +0200
From: Milan Broz <gmazyland@...il.com>
To: discussions@...sword-hashing.net
Subject: Re: [PHC] On the Test Results (paper from Milan Broz)

Hi,

thanks for the feedback!

On 03/30/2015 07:26 PM, Stefan.Lucks@...-weimar.de wrote:
> Dear Milan,
> 
>>  https://github.com/mbroz/PHCtest/blob/master/output/phc_round2.pdf
> 
> thank you for your work!
> 
> We (the Catena team) have two comments, a minor one and a major one.
> 
> 1. The minor one is that the output length for Cartena *appears* to be 
> limited to 64 bytes. But, if you really need longer outputs, it would be 
> straightforward to employ Catena-KG, the key generation variant of Catena. 
> Apart from key generation, we cannot think of any reason why one would 
> want to use longer password hashes, but there is nothing so special about 
> key generation, that you cannot use it for ordinary password hashing, if 
> you want to.

I am fully aware of Catena-KG KDF (Algorithm 6 in your paper). But because
I am using 64bytes output, I simplified this test and used output
of PHC directly.
You are right that the output length chart is misleading
here, it should use Catena-KG. Will try to fix that or mention this explicitly.

Basically it was intended to measure PHC() function only.
(The same problem is for battcrypt, it also defines final iterative
hashing for KDF mode which I did not use.)

Side note: For Truecrypt in XTS mode and chained 3 ciphers you will
need 3 x 512bits key (256bit tweak key + 256bit enc. key in XTS mode),
so 1536 bits = 192 bytes.
This is the longest output (with real-world example) I have ever seen for FDE systems.

> 2. The major concern is about your test for the KDF mode.
> 
> In our design document, we have been very specific that we suggest to use 
> Catena-Butterfly, for the case that the defender's memory is quite 
> limited, and the defender desires to push back all attackers with even 
> less memory (per core). On the other hand, we explicitly recommend 
> Catena-Butterfly if the defender is going to use plenty of memory, 
> definitively with 100 MB or more.

Well, I read recommendations in section 7 and just used Butterfly.
I think I should include both instances then to avoid your concern.

But it does not change statement that the run time > 30s for Butterfly version,
and 1G memory is just too long. It fits other use cases but not this one.

Catena-Dragongly is definitely better from this point of view.

> Using the Catena-Axungia tool,
> 
>    https://github.com/medsec/catena-axungia
> 
> we measured the following values:
> 
>  		1MB     100MB   1G
> Dragonfly	0.008   0.20    3.14
> Butterfly	0.034   1.78    33.7

Yes, this is a nice tool. (Just it was not yet available when I run tests.)

> Our values for Catena-Butterfly are slightly faster than the one you 
> measured. This is not an issue. We guess, our machine is 5--10% faster 
> than the one you used.
> 
> But unfortunately, you didn't benchmark Catena-Dragonfly, even though that 
> is the variant we recommend for big memory.

I will add it to tests.

Thanks,
Milan


> As the results show, Catena-Dragonfly can easily allocate and use the 
> required memory while maintaining a speed of <<1 second (for 100 MB) or 
> <<20 seconds (for 1 GB).
> 
> So long
> 
> Stefan
> 
> 
> ------  I  love  the  taste  of  Cryptanalysis  in  the morning!  ------
> uni-weimar.de/de/medien/professuren/mediensicherheit/people/stefan-lucks
> --Stefan.Lucks (at) uni-weimar.de, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Germany--
> 

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