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Memory-Hard Functions from Cryptographic Primitives

Authors:
Binyi Chen
Stefano Tessaro
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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-26951-7_19 (login may be required)
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Abstract: Memory-hard functions (MHFs) are moderately-hard functions which enforce evaluation costs both in terms of time and memory (often, in form of a trade-off). They are used e.g. for password protection, password-based key-derivation, and within cryptocurrencies, and have received a considerable amount of theoretical scrutiny over the last few years. However, analyses see MHFs as modes of operation of some underlying hash function $$\mathcal {H}$$, modeled as a monolithic random oracle. This is however a very strong assumption, as such hash functions are built from much simpler primitives, following somewhat ad-hoc design paradigms.This paper initiates the study of how to securely instantiate $$\mathcal {H}$$ within MHF designs using common cryptographic primitives like block ciphers, compression functions, and permutations. Security here will be in a model in which the adversary has parallel access to an idealized version of the underlying primitive. We will provide provably memory-hard constructions from all the aforementioned primitives. Our results are generic, in that we will rely on hard-to-pebble graphs designed in prior works to obtain our constructions.One particular challenge we encounter is that $$\mathcal {H}$$ is usually required to have large outputs (to increase memory hardness without changing the description size of MHFs), whereas the underlying primitives generally have small output sizes.
Video from CRYPTO 2019
BibTeX
@article{crypto-2019-29898,
  title={Memory-Hard Functions from Cryptographic Primitives},
  booktitle={Advances in Cryptology – CRYPTO 2019},
  series={Lecture Notes in Computer Science},
  publisher={Springer},
  volume={11693},
  pages={543-572},
  doi={10.1007/978-3-030-26951-7_19},
  author={Binyi Chen and Stefano Tessaro},
  year=2019
}