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The CipherFlow Project

People:

Project Description:

The CipherFlow project team investigate the following question: Can SIMD parallel machines be effectively used for cryptanalysis? Since SIMD machines can have very large number (105 to 107) of processors, one should be able to harness a huge computational power for brute force cryptanalysis. All processors could take the same cleartext ciphertext pair and test all possible keys to find which key will encrypt the cleartext and match the ciphertext. The large key set is divided among the processors, each processor checking a different set of keys.

One of the project goals is to show that parallel SIMD machines provide cost-effective alternative to custom built brute force cryptanalysis machines. SIMD machines are programmable. Therefore, unlike custom built cryptanalysis machines that use custom ICs built to execute a single encryption algorithm, SIMD machines can be programmed to carry out brute force cryptanalysis for any cipher!

Early results: So far we used the PixelFlow's "Enhanced Memory Array" (EMA) to carry out brute force cryptanalysis for 40-bit RC4 cipher and to develop brute force techniques to break UNIX passwords. Since PixelFlow was not designed to do cryptanalysis, we discovered that it is missing some instructions that could make cryptanalysis run much faster. An 18 board EMA configuration has 147,456 8-bit processors running at 100 MHz. The machine could check all 240 RC4-40 keys in 7.5 hours. That means that, on the average, the machine can find a key in about 3.25 hours. The machine can check 24,576,000 UNIX passwords or 614,000,000 DES keys per second.
 

Project Links:

DRAFT Press Release.
 
 

The PixelFlow Project at UNC

Selected PixelFlow Publications:

PixelFlow: High-Speed Rendering Using Image Composition

PixelFlow: High-Speed Rendering Using Image Composition. Part-2

PixelFlow: The Realization

Acknowledgments