On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 6:05 AM, Schlacta, Christ <aarcane@aarcane.org> wrote:

If any weakened algorithm is to be implemented, how can we know how weak is too weak, and how strong is sufficient? Each professional Cryptographer has given different opinions and all those at our immediate disposal have now been biased.

A good way to do that is use an algorithm that has attracted interest from a large number of independent cryptographers. If many cryptographers have invested extensive effort trying to find weaknesses in a algorithm, and haven't reported any, then we can feel more confident that it is less likely to harbor undiscovered weaknesses. Among the algorithms we've been talking about in this thread, SHA-256, HMAC-MD5, Skein, Keccak, and BLAKE are all in this category of being well-studied. Cryptographers publish it if they find a weakness in a reduced-round variant of an important algorithm. You can see a summary of the best results against weakened variants of BLAKE in ¹ (Table 1). ¹ http://eprint.iacr.org/2013/467 The rows labeled "perm." and "cf." are attacks on just one component of the hash, not the whole algorithm. The "# Rounds" column shows how many rounds of a reduced-round variant would be vulnerable to that attack. Don't forget to look at the "Complexity" column, too! That shows (roughly) how many calculations would be necessary to implement the attack. Yes, almost all of them are computations that are completely impossible for anyone to actually execute in the forseeable future. But still, they are the best attack that anyone has (publicly) come up with against those weakened variants of BLAKE so they serve as a heuristic indicator of how strong it is. Among the well-studied algorithms listed above, BLAKE is one of the best-studied. It was one of the five finalists in the SHA-3 contest, and in the final report of the contest ², NIST wrote “The cryptanalysis performed on BLAKE […] appears to have a great deal of depth”. Here is a list of research reports that analyzed BLAKE: ³. ² http://dx.doi.org/10.6028/NIST.IR.7896 ³ https://131002.net/blake/#cr Now, BLAKE2 is not necessarily as secure as BLAKE. We could have accidentally introduced weaknesses into BLAKE2 when making tweaks to optimize it. The paper ¹ looked for such weaknesses and reported that they found nothing to make them distrust BLAKE2. We use a stream cipher named ChaCha ⁴,⁵ as the core of BLAKE and BLAKE2, and nobody has found any weakness in ChaCha. Again, that doesn't mean we didn't manage to screw it up somehow, but I think it helps! If anyone found a weakness in ChaCha, it would *probably* also show them a weakness in BLAKE2, and vice versa. ⁴ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChaCha_%28cipher%29#ChaCha_variant ⁵ https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-agl-tls-chacha20poly1305-02 In sum, there has been a lot of independent analysis of BLAKE2, BLAKE, and ChaCha, and I hope there will be more in the future. If you use a reduced-round version of BLAKE2, you can look at these results to see whether anyone has published an attack that would break that reduced-round version. Of course, more rounds is safer against future breakthroughs. It was in that context that I recommended that ZFS use the most rounds of BLAKE2 that it can while still being faster than Edon-R. ☺ That will probably be around 5 rounds. Regards, Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn Founder, CEO, and Customer Support Rep https://LeastAuthority.com Freedom matters. ------------------------------------------- illumos-zfs Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/182191/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/182191/22842876-6fe17e6f Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=22842876&id_secret=22842876-a25d3366 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com