Re: Which hash function to use, was Re: RFC: Another proposed hash function transition plan

Hi,

On Fri, 16 Jun 2017, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:

On Fri, Jun 16 2017, brian m. carlson jotted:

quoted

On Fri, Jun 16, 2017 at 01:36:13AM +0200, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:

quoted

So I don't follow the argument that we shouldn't weigh future HW
acceleration highly just because you can't easily buy a laptop today
with these features.

Aside from that I think you've got this backwards, it's AMD that's
adding SHA acceleration to their high-end Ryzen chips[1] but Intel is
starting at the lower end this year with Goldmont which'll be in
lower-end consumer devices[2]. If you read the github issue I linked
to upthread[3] you can see that the cryptopp devs already tested
their SHA accelerated code on a consumer Celeron[4] recently.

I don't think Intel has announced the SHA extensions for future Xeon
releases, but it seems given that they're going to have it there as
well. Have there every been x86 extensions that aren't eventually
portable across the entire line, or that they've ended up removing
from x86 once introduced?

In any case, I think by the time we're ready to follow-up the current
hash refactoring efforts with actually changing the hash
implementation many of us are likely to have laptops with these
extensions, making this easy to test.

I think you underestimate the life of hardware and software.  I have
servers running KVM development instances that have been running since
at least 2012.  Those machines are not scheduled for replacement
anytime soon.

Whatever we deploy within the next year is going to run on existing
hardware for probably a decade, whether we want it to or not.  Most of
those machines don't have acceleration.

To clarify, I'm not dismissing the need to consider existing hardware
without these acceleration functions or future processors without them.
I don't think that makes any sense, we need to keep those in mind.

I was replying to a bit in your comment where you (it seems to me) were
making the claim that we shouldn't consider the HW acceleration of
certain hash functions either.

Yes, I also had the impression that it stressed the status quo quite a bit
too much.

We know for a fact that SHA-256 acceleration is coming to consumer CPUs.
We know of no plans for any of the other mentioned hash functions to
hardware-accelerate them in consumer CPUs.

And remember: for those who are affected most (humongous monorepos, source
code hosters), upgrading hardware is less of an issue than having a secure
hash function for the rest of us.

And while I am really thankful that Adam chimed in, I think he would agree
that BLAKE2 is a purposefully weakened version of BLAKE, for the benefit
of speed (with the caveat that one of my experts disagrees that BLAKE2b
would be faster than hardware-accelerated SHA-256). And while BLAKE has
seen roughly equivalent cryptanalysis as Keccak (which became SHA-3),
BLAKE2 has not.

That makes me *very* uneasy about choosing BLAKE2.

quoted

Furthermore, you need a reasonably modern crypto library to get hardware
acceleration.  OpenSSL has only recently gained support for it.  RHEL 7
does not currently support it, and probably never will.  That OS is
going to be around for the next 6 years.

If we're optimizing for performance, I don't want to optimize for the
latest, greatest machines.  Those machines are going to outperform
everything else either way.  I'd rather optimize for something which
performs well on the whole everywhere.  There are a lot of developers
who have older machines, for cost reasons or otherwise.

We have real data showing that the intersection between people who care
about the hash slowing down and those who can't afford the latest
hardware is pretty much nil.

I.e. in 2.13.0 SHA-1 got slower, and pretty much nobody noticed or cared
except Johannes Schindelin, myself & Christian Couder. This is because
in practice hashing only becomes a bottleneck on huge monorepos that
need to e.g. re-hash the contents of a huge index.

Indeed. I am still concerned about that. As you mention, though, it really
only affects users of ginormous monorepos, and of course source code
hosters.

The jury's still out on how much it impacts my colleagues, by the way.

I have no doubt that Visual Studio Team Services, GitHub and Atlassian
will eventually end up with FPGAs for hash computation. So that's that.

Side note: BLAKE is actually *not* friendly to hardware acceleration, I
have been told by one cryptography expert. In contrast, the Keccak team
claims SHA3-256 to be the easiest to hardware-accelerate, making it "a
green cryptographic primitive":
http://keccak.noekeon.org/is_sha3_slow.html

quoted

Here are some stats (cycles/byte for long messages):

                   SHA-256    BLAKE2b
Ryzen                 1.89       3.06
Knight's Landing     19.00       5.65
Cortex-A72            1.99       5.48
Cortex-A57           11.81       5.47
Cortex-A7            28.19      15.16

In other words, BLAKE2b performs well uniformly across a wide variety of
architectures even without acceleration.  I'd rather tell people that
upgrading to a new hash algorithm is a performance win either way, not
just if they have the latest hardware.

Yup, all of those need to be considered, although given my comment above
about big repos a 40% improvement on Ryzen (a processor likely to be
used for big repos) stands out, where are those numbers from, and is
that with or without HW accel for SHA-256 on Ryzen?

When it comes to BLAKE2, I would actually strongly suggest to consider the
amount of attempts to break it. Or rather, how much less attention it got
than, say, SHA-256.

In any case, I have been encouraged to stress the importance of
"crypto-agility", i.e. the ability to switch to another algorithm when the
current one gets broken "enough".

And I am delighted that that is exactly the direction we are going. In
other words, even if I still think (backed up by the experts on whose
knowledge I lean heavily to form my opinions) that SHA-256 would be the
best choice for now, it should be relatively easy to offer BLAKE2b support
for (and by [*1*]) those who want it.

Ciao,
Dscho

Footnote *1*: I say that the support for BLAKE2b should come from those
parties who desire it also because it is not as ubiquituous as SHA-256.
Hence, it would add the burden of having a performant and reasonably
bug-free implementation in Git's source tree. IIUC OpenSSL added BLAKE2b
support only in OpenSSL 1.1.0, the 1.0.2 line (which is still in use in
many places, e.g. Git for Windows' SDK) does not, meaning: Git's
implementation would be the one *everybody* relies on, with *no*
fall-back.