Coding and Cryptography Computer Cluster (CCCC)
This page describes the activities of the Coding and Cryptography
Computer Cluster (CCCC) at the Technische
Universiteit Eindhoven. The cluster belongs to the Coding and
Cryptography group which is part of the Eindhoven Institute for the
Protection of Systems and Information (EIPSI).
So, here is the main character of this page:
Current project
The cluster is running full time on breaking
ECC2K-130, an elliptic curve
discrete logarithm problem on a curve over
F2131. Some details are in ePrint Archive Report
2009/466 .
Past projects
- The cluster did a warm up exercise for the big ECDLP computation
and finished the ECC2K-95 challenge in 19h, using all 10 machines and
full fledged client server communication.
- The cluster finished breaking the hash function FSB48
(toy version). The first stage showed which clamping constants to use;
the second stage finished quickly after that. We updated the preprint
ePrint Archive Report
2009/292 and presented this at SHARCS. Latest news is that our
paper got accepted to Indocrypt.
- Computing near collisions for SHA-1. Engineyard posted a nice
challenge that occupied all machines for 30 hours so that we could see
how the cluster was doing. Results are that the new power supplies are
working well and that hautbrion needed a new case fan (and thus didn't
participate). We now treated it to a new case fan (17 EUR) and it's
back up running.
You can follow our (Dan and Tanja) postings
during the competition on CodingCrypto's Twitter
page. (Admittedly we were getting quite a bit of help from Bo-Yin and Doug who have
decent GPUs to throw at this.)
The contest worked out very well
for us - we reached distance 30! For details have a look at our results
page. The code is available here.
- Partial runs (left tree) of generalized birthday attack on the
hash function FSB48 (toy version). Work by Daniel J. Bernstein, Tanja Lange, Ruben Niederhagen, Christiane Peters, and Peter Schwabe.
Preliminary version published as ePrint Archive Report
2009/292.
- Contributing CPU cycles to Search for
Primitive Trinomials (mod 2) (led by Richard Brent and Paul Zimmermann).
-
Running tests on timing for computing Chevalley bases in Lie
algebras. Work by Arjeh
M. Cohen and
Dan Roozemond, published as "Computing Chevalley bases in small
characteristics" in Journal of Algebra, Volume 322, Issue 3, August
2009, pages 703-721. Preprint is available on arXiv.
-
Search for
good curves for ECM. This is work by Daniel J. Bernstein, Peter Birkner, Tanja Lange, and Christiane
Peters. Preliminary version published as ePrint Archive Report
2008/016.
-
Attacking the McEliece cryptosystem with the original parameters
(n=1024, k=524, t=50). The attack finished after 8000
CPU-days. See also the press
coverage.
-
Optimizing the parameters for running the attack on the McEliece
cryptosystem with n=1024, k=524, t=50 (original parameters).
Details on Computing the
iteration counts and Work by Daniel J. Bernstein, Tanja Lange, and Christiane Peters. Result
published as "Attacking
and defending the McEliece cryptosystem". In: Post-Quantum
Cryptography, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 5299,
pp. 31-46. Springer, 2008.
- Search for good curves of genus two over
F2113 with 2-rank 1. Point counting was
done using a program by Wouter
Castryck; the results are published in Peter Birkner's PhD thesis. One
good curve is used in the implementation of HECTOR, a system submitted
to eBATS as signature
and key agreement scheme.
-
Computing optimal double-base chains for various elliptic curve
representations and coordinate systems. This is work by Daniel J. Bernstein, Peter Birkner, Tanja Lange, and Christiane Peters. Results
published as
"Optimizing double-base elliptic-curve single-scalar
multiplication". In: INDOCRYPT 2007, Lecture Notes in Computer
Science, Vol. 4859, pp. 167-182. Springer, 2007.
-
Several smaller projects that haven't led to publications, yet.
The cluster
The Coding and Cryptography Computer Cluster is a
a ten-node cluster of conventional desktop PCs. Each node has an Intel
Core 2 Quad Q6600 CPU with a clock rate of 2.40GHz and direct fully
cached access to 8GB of RAM. Each computer has a 750GB Western Digital
SATA hard disk. The nodes are connected via switched Gigabit Ethernet
using Marvell PCI-E adapter cards.
Last modified: Fri Oct 23 00:56:40 CEST 2009
by Tanja