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Attacking memory-hard scrypt with near-data-processing

In a traditional DRAM-based main memory architecture, a memory access operation requires much more time and energy than a simple logic operation. This fact is exploited to build time-consuming and power-hungry memory-hard cryptographic functions that serve the purpose of hindering brute-force security attacks. The security of such memory-hard functions depends entirely on the non-trivial costs of memory access. However, various compute-capable memory technologies have recently emerged as promising ways to reduce the memory access bottleneck, yet no one has looked into how they may impact the security of memory-hard cryptographic functions. In this preliminary work, we investigate the impact of near-data-processing (NDP) on scrypt, a widely used memory-hard password-based key-derivation function, and discuss the opportunities to further undermine scrypt using compute-capable memory.