phc-discussions - Re: [PHC] Argon2 improvement thread

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Date: Fri, 14 Aug 2015 13:38:53 +0200
From: Thomas Pornin <pornin@...et.org>
To: discussions@...sword-hashing.net
Subject: Re: [PHC] Argon2 improvement thread

On Fri, Aug 14, 2015 at 06:06:01AM +0000, Peter Gutmann wrote:
> Krisztián Pintér <pinterkr@...il.com> writes:
> 
> >5, the result should be a binary of the designed length. no encoding or
> >parameter-prepending is necassary. rationale: it is the task of the outer
> >layers. 
> 
> +1.  PKCS #7/CMS/PGP/etc already do this for you, so you don't need to encode
> parameters yourself.

However, the counterargument can be made that leaving the "outer layers"
do the job incurs the risk of seeing the job botched by people who are
not fully aware of what a salt could be.

If you consider what people actually do when they use PBKDF2 or bcrypt
for basic password verification in a Web server: far too many get it
wrong with the salt when using PBKDF2 (e.g. using the same fixed salt
for all users), but not when they use bcrypt. The main reason for that
is not that bcrypt users have understood what the salt is for; rather,
it is because the bcrypt implementations already encode the parameters
and salts into a single aggregate string, and it would take creative
effort not to use it properly.

In an ideal world, the implementation for a password-hashing function
would offer both a "simple" implementation that encodes parameter, salt
and output into a string, to be used for password verification purposes,
_and_ an "advanced" implementation that outputs the raw binary output,
which is what you need anyway for a KDF. (For what it's worth, I did
that for the reference implementations of Makwa.)

All of this _can_ be done with an "outer layer", a simple wrapper around
the raw-output implementation; however I think it is important that such
a wrapper be made "standard" by publishing it with the function
reference implementation itself. In any case, an aggregate string is
what people will end up storing in their /etc/shadow files or in many
databases, and it is convenient when such strings can be moved around,
which requires following a standard encoding.

	--Thomas Pornin