Paper 2026/018

Multi-Instance Unrecoverability of iMHF-Based Password Hashing

Abstract

The study of memory-hard functions (MHFs) so far has mainly focused on providing provable guarantees on the expected minimum cumulative memory complexity (CMC) required per evaluation when amortized over multiple instances. Such results, however, do not provide any guarantees for the security of compromised password banks in the sense of passwords remaining unrecoverable. Indeed, a construction can be memory-hard while still leaking information about its input. We provide the first formal treatment of the unrecoverability of graph-based data-independent MHFs (iMHFs) in the multi-instance setting. Multi-instance security is the accepted security model when inputs have low-entropy or are correlated, and require the adversarial effort to linearly scale with the number of instances broken. To prove these results, we appropriately extend the ex-post-facto pebbling technique of Alwen and Serbinenko (STOC'15) and the unguessability reductions of Farshim and Tessaro (EUROCRYPT'21). We then use the resulting compatible frameworks to bound the number of guesses of adversaries with a given CMC in terms of the pebbling complexity of the graph underlying the iMHF. Combined with known lower bounds for the pebbling complexities of their graphs, we obtain, as corollaries, concrete unrecoverability bounds for the Argon2i, Catena, and Balloon hashing, showing in particular that the advantage indeed scales linearly with the number of instances and the cumulative memory complexity of the attacker.