On Sun, 26 May 2013, Florian Kirstein wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> On Sat, May 25, 2013 at 10:37:44AM -0500, Jonathan Brown wrote:
> > Please also increase the iteration amount to be optionally user specified.
> > This way you we can dramaticly slow down a potential brute force attack
> > against a captured key.
> 
> While using OpenSSL to increase the security of OpenSSH private keys
> by adding PBKDF2 iterations to it, I also hit that issue - and built a
> small patch for OpenSSL to be able to specify the number of rounds. 

PBKDF2 with an inner hash of SHAanything is a losing game: offline
crackers can run the hash much faster than the user can even without
special hardware, e.g. using GPU parallelism. Even the special hardware
is relatively cheap these days, with 1Thash/sec available for a few
hundred dollars in the form of bitcoin mining hardware.

Please consider allowing a choice of algorithms including bcrypt and/or
scrypt as the KDF (I can send you our proposal for a bcrypt_kdf if you
are interested). 

Is there any likelihood that OpenSSL are going to look at improving
the private key KDF soon? If not then I'll make something OpenSSH-
specific for private key storage.

-d
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