Hey! I'm David, cofounder of zkSecurity and the author of the Real-World Cryptography book. I was previously a crypto architect at O(1) Labs (working on the Mina cryptocurrency), before that I was the security lead for Diem (formerly Libra) at Novi (Facebook), and a security consultant for the Cryptography Services of NCC Group. This is my blog about cryptography and security and other related topics that I find interesting.
It's my first survey ever and I had much fun writing it! I don't really know if I can call it a survey, it reads like a vulgarization/explanation of the papers from Coppersmith, Howgrave-Graham, Boneh and Durfee, Herrmann and May. There is a short table of the running times at the end of each sections. There is also the code of the implementations I coded at the end of the survey.
If you spot a typo or something weird, wrong, or badly explained. Please tell me!
I've Implemented a Coppersmith-type attack (using LLL reductions of lattice basis). It was done by Boneh and Durfee and later simplified by Herrmann and May. The program can be found on my github.
The attack allows us to break RSA and the private exponent d.
Here's why RSA works (where e is the public exponent, phi is euler's totient function, N is the public modulus):
\[ ed = 1 \pmod{\varphi(N)} \]
\[ \implies ed = k \cdot \varphi(N) + 1 \text{ over } \mathbb{Z} \]
\[ \implies k \cdot \varphi(N) + 1 = 0 \pmod{e} \]
\[ \implies k \cdot (N + 1 - p - q) + 1 = 0 \pmod{e} \]
\[ \implies 2k \cdot (\frac{N + 1}{2} + \frac{-p -q}{2}) + 1 = 0 \pmod{e} \]
The last equation gives us a bivariate polynomial \( f(x,y) = 1 + x \cdot (A + y) \). Finding the roots of this polynomial will allow us to easily compute the private exponent d.
The attack works if the private exponent d is too small compared to the modulus: \( d < N^{0.292} \).
To use it:
look at the tests in boneh_durfee.sage and make your own with your own values for the public exponent e and the public modulus N.
guess how small the private exponent d is and modify delta so you have d < N^delta
tweak m and t until you find something. You can use Herrmann and May optimized t = tau * m with tau = 1-2*delta. Keep in mind that the bigger they are, the better it is, but the longer it will take. Also we must have 1 <= t <= m.
you can also decrease X as it might be too high compared to the root of x you are trying to find. This is a last recourse tweak though.
Here is the tweakable part in the code:
# Tweak values here !
delta = 0.26 # so that d < N^delta
m = 3 # x-shifts
t = 1 # y-shifts # we must have 1 <= t <= m
A Bloom filter is a space-efficient probabilistic data structure, conceived by Burton Howard Bloom in 1970, that is used to test whether an element is a member of a set. False positive matches are possible, but false negatives are not, thus a Bloom filter has a 100% recall rate. In other words, a query returns either "possibly in set" or "definitely not in set". Elements can be added to the set, but not removed (though this can be addressed with a "counting" filter). The more elements that are added to the set, the larger the probability of false positives.
One of my professor is organizing a CTF, it's in french (sorry), it will start next month and should last for a week, and... there might be a challenge I've made for them =). I don't know if it has been accepted but here you go: HackingWeek 2015 if you are interested and you can speak french
Thomas Ptacek had left Matasano, 2 years after selling to NCC, and I spotted him talking about a new "hiring" kind of company on hackernews... Well today they announced what is going to be a new kind of hiring process. After the revolution of education with Coursera and other MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses), now comes the revolution of hiring. It's called Starfighter and it will be live soon.
Because studying Cryptography is also about using LaTeX, it's nice to spend a bit of time understanding how to make pretty documents. Because, you know, it's nicer to read.
Here's an awesome quick introduction of Tikz that allows to make beautiful diagram with great precision in a short time:
And I'm bookmarking one more that seems go way further.
