Abstract

MUKHOPADHYAY, Sourav  and  SARKAR, Palash. Hardware Architecture and Cost/time/data Trade-off for Generic Inversion of One-Way Function. Comp. y Sist. [online]. 2009, vol.12, n.3, pp.331-355. ISSN 2007-9737.

In many cases, a cryptographic algorithm can be viewed as a one-way function, which is easy to compute in forward direction but hard to invert. Inverting such one-way function amounts to breaking the algorithm. Time-Memory Trade-Off (TMTO) is a twenty five years old generic technique for inverting one-way functions. The most feasible implementation of TMTO is in special purpose hardware. In this paper, we describe a systematic architecture for implementing TMTO. We break down the offline and online phases into simpler tasks and identify opportunities for pipelining and parallelism. This results in a detailed top-level architecture. Many of our design choices are based on intuition. We develop a cost model for our architecture. Analysis of the cost model shows that 128-bit keys seem safe for the present. However, key sizes less than 96 bits do not provide comfortable security assurances.

Keywords : One-way function; generic method; time/meomry trade-off cryptanalysis.