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Optimizing a password hashing function with hardware-accelerated symmetric encryption

Abstract:

Password-based key derivation functions (PBKDFs) are commonly used to transform user passwords into keys for symmetric encryption, as well as for user authentication, password hashing, and preventing attacks based on custom hardware. We propose two optimized alternatives that enhance the performance of a previously published PBKDF. This design is based on (1) employing a symmetric cipher, the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), as a pseudo-random generator and (2) taking advantage of the support for the hardware acceleration for AES that is available on many common platforms in order to mitigate common attacks to password-based user authentication systems. We also analyze their security characteristics, establishing that they are equivalent to the security of the core primitive (AES), and we compare their performance with well-known PBKDF algorithms, such as Scrypt and Argon2, with favorable results.