Static-Memory-Hard Functions, and Modeling the Cost of Space vs. Time

Abstract

A series of recent research starting with (Alwen and Serbinenko, STOC 2015) has deepened our understanding of the notion of memory-hardness in cryptography—a useful property of hash functions for deterring large-scale password-cracking attacks—and has shown memory-hardness to have intricate connections with the theory of graph pebbling. Definitions of memory-hardness are not yet unified in the somewhat nascent field of memory-hardness, however, and the guarantees proven to date are with respect to a range of proposed definitions. In this paper, we observe two significant and practical considerations that are not analyzed by existing models of memory-hardness, and propose new models to capture them, accompanied by constructions based on new hard-to-pebble graphs. Our contribution is two-fold, as follows. First, existing measures of memory-hardness only account for dynamic memory usage (i.e., memory read/written at runtime), and do not consider static memory usage (e.g., memory on disk). Among other things, this means that memory requirements considered by prior models are inherently upper-bounded by a hash function’s runtime; in contrast, counting static memory would potentially allow quantification of much larger memory requirements, decoupled from runtime. We propose a new definition of static-memory-hard function (SHF) which takes static memory into account: we model static memory usage by oracle access to a large preprocessed string, which may be considered part of the hash function description. Static memory requirements are complementary to dynamic memory requirements: neither can replace the other, and to deter large-scale password-cracking attacks, a hash function will benefit from being both dynamic-memory-hard and static-memory-hard. We give two SHF constructions based on pebbling. To prove static-memory-hardness, we define a new pebble game (“black-magic pebble game”), and new graph constructions with optimal complexity under our proposed measure. Moreover, we provide a prototype implementation of our first SHF construction (which is based on pebbling of a simple “cylinder” graph), providing an initial demonstration of practical feasibility for a limited range of parameter settings. Secondly, existing memory-hardness models implicitly assume that the cost of space and time are more or less on par: they consider only linear ratios between the costs of time and space. We propose a new model to capture nonlinear time-space trade-offs: e.g., how is the adversary impacted when space is quadratically more expensive than time? We prove that nonlinear tradeoffs can in fact cause adversaries to employ different strategies from linear tradeoffs.