Abstract
This paper presents a hardware architecture for UNIX password cracking using Hellman’s time-memory trade-off; it is the first hardware design for a key search machine based on the rainbow variant proposed by Oechslin. The implementation target is the Berkeley BEE2 FPGA platform which can run at 400 million password calculations/second. Our design targets passwords of length 48 bits (out of 56). This means that with one BEE2 module the precomputation for one salt takes about 8 days, resulting in a storage of 56 Gigabyte. For the precomputation of all salts in one year we would need 92 BEE2 modules. Recovering an individual password requires a few minutes on a Virtex-4 FPGA.
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References
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Mentens, N., Batina, L., Preneel, B., Verbauwhede, I. (2006). Time-Memory Trade-Off Attack on FPGA Platforms: UNIX Password Cracking. In: Bertels, K., Cardoso, J.M.P., Vassiliadis, S. (eds) Reconfigurable Computing: Architectures and Applications. ARC 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3985. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11802839_41
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11802839_41
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-36708-6
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