Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2005/207

Some Thoughts on Time-Memory-Data Tradeoffs

Alex Biryukov

Abstract: In this paper we show that Time-Memory tradeoff by Hellman may be extended to Time-Memory-Key tradeoff thus allowing attacks much faster than exhaustive search for ciphers for which typically it is stated that no such attack exists. For example, as a result AES with 128-bit key has only 85-bit security if $2^{43}$ encryptions of an arbitrary fixed text under different keys are available to the attacker. Such attacks are generic and are more practical than some recent high complexity chosen related-key attacks on round-reduced versions of AES. They constitute a practical threat for any cipher with 80-bit or shorter keys and are marginally practical for 128-bit key ciphers. We also show that UNIX password scheme even with carefully generated passwords is vulnerable to practical tradeoff attacks. Finally we also demonstrate a combination of rainbow tables with the time-memory-data tradeoff which results in a new tradeoff curve.

Category / Keywords: secret-key cryptography / Time-Memory-Data Tradeoff

Date: received 30 Jun 2005

Contact author: abiryuko at esat kuleuven be

Available formats: Postscript (PS) | Compressed Postscript (PS.GZ) | PDF | BibTeX Citation

Note: It seems that we will have to give up the convenient world in which we assumed a k-bit security for a good k-bit key cipher.

Version: 20050701:052600 (All versions of this report)

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