Heterogenic Distributed System for Cryptanalysis of Elliptic Curve Based Cryptosystems

Public-key cryptosystems allow secure connections and data exchange through unsafe communication channel without the need of a previous secure key exchange. The most popular cryptosystem used nowadays is RSA. However recently a serious rival appeared – Elliptic Curve Cryptosystems (ECC).Cryptanalytic attack on ECC system involves solving the Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem (ECDLP). The best known algorithm used to solve ECDLP is Pollard’s rho method. So far successful attacks on ECC systems were mostly based on distributed computer networks.In this paper a heterogenic (software & hardware) distributed cryptanalytic system is presented. Proposed solution utilizes the concept of distributing computation in network of general purpose computers and specialized hardware units with FPGA structures. Such hybrid system allows for very efficient cryptanalysis of cryptosystems based on elliptic curves.Estimated computation time of attacks on specific curves from Certicom Challenge list using proposed system is presented.