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Message-ID: <20131219023142.GA24619@openwall.com>
Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2013 06:31:43 +0400
From: Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>
To: crypt-dev@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: scrypt parallelism vs. area-time vs. TMTO resistance
On Thu, Dec 19, 2013 at 06:08:53AM +0400, Solar Designer wrote:
> * Classic scrypt is available by setting flags to ESCRYPT_WORM [...]
> [...] In this mode, the thread-local memory region (RAM)
> * is first sequentially written to and then randomly read from. This
> * algorithm is friendly towards time-memory tradeoffs, available both to
> * defenders (albeit not in this implementation) and to attackers.
> *
> * Setting ESCRYPT_RW adds extra random reads and writes to the thread-local
> * memory region (RAM), which makes time-memory tradeoffs less efficient.
> * This may be used to slow down the kinds of attackers who would otherwise
> * benefit from classic scrypt's efficient time-memory tradeoff.
I realized the above quote may be confusing in what "thread-local memory
region" refers to, so I'd like to clarify: it's about possible use of
threads by the calling application, not about possible (additional) use
of threads (for p>1) by an optimized implementation of escrypt. [ The
comment talks about it because there's also a possible data structure
that is shared between the application-level threads (if they exist at
all), and is naturally read-only to the threads. ]
In other words, this quote's mention of threads is irrelevant to the
(different) threads that I was talking about in the previous message.
The rest of the source code comment that this quote came from is
nevertheless relevant.
Alexander
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