Custom hardware attack

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
"COPACOBANA" redirects here. Not to be confused with Copacabana.
The EFF's "Deep Crack" machine contained 1,856 custom chips and could brute force a DES key in a matter of days — the photo shows a circuit board fitted with 32 custom attack chips

In cryptography, a custom hardware attack uses specifically designed application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) to decipher encrypted messages.

Mounting a cryptographic

logic circuits, also known as gates. Integrated circuits (ICs) are constructed of these gates and often can execute cryptographic algorithms hundreds of times faster than a general purpose computer.[1]

Each IC can contain large numbers of gates (hundreds of millions in 2005). Thus, the same decryption circuit, or cell, can be replicated thousands of times on one IC. The communications requirements for these ICs are very simple. Each must be initially loaded with a starting point in the key space and, in some situations, with a comparison test value (see

known plaintext attack
). Output consists of a signal that the IC has found an answer and the successful key.

Since ICs lend themselves to mass production, thousands or even millions of ICs can be applied to a single problem. The ICs themselves can be mounted in

IC fabrication, floor space, electric power and thermal dissipation.[2]

History

The earliest custom hardware attack may have been the

digital hardware. Adjusting for inflation over 8 years yields an even higher improvement of about 30x. Since 2007, SciEngines GmbH, a spin-off company of the two project partners of COPACOBANA has enhanced and developed successors of COPACOBANA. In 2008, their COPACOBANA RIVYERA reduced the time to break DES to the current record of less than one day, using 128 Spartan-3 5000's.[4] It is generally believed[citation needed] that large government code breaking organizations, such as the U.S. National Security Agency, make extensive use of custom hardware attacks, but no examples have been declassified or leaked as of 2005
.

See also

References

  1. S2CID 257725561
    .
  2. S2CID 85547788
    .
  3. ^ Gerd Pfeiffer; Christof Paar; Jan Pelzl; Sandeep Kumar; Andy Rupp; Manfred Schimmler. How to Break DES for EUR 8,980 (PDF). SHARCS 2006.
  4. ^ Break DES in less than a single day Archived 2011-07-16 at the Wayback Machine [Press release of firm, demonstrated at a 2009 workshop]

External links

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