How to Handle Rainbow Tables with External Memory

Florent Tardif (1, 2) , Gildas Avoine (2, 3, 4) , Xavier Carpent (5) , Barbara Kordy (2, 3)

1 UR - Université de Rennes
2 EMSEC - EMbedded SEcurity and Cryptography
3 INSA Rennes - Institut National des Sciences Appliquées - Rennes
4 IUF - Institut universitaire de France
5 UC Irvine - University of California [Irvine]

A cryptanalytic time-memory trade-off is a technique that aims to reduce the time needed to perform an exhaustive search. Such a technique requires large-scale precomputation that is performed once for all and whose result is stored in a fast-access internal memory. When the considered cryptographic problem is overwhelmingly-sized, using an external memory is eventually needed, though. In this paper, we consider the rainbow tables – the most widely spread version of time-memory trade-offs. The objective of our work is to analyze the relevance of storing the precomputed data on an external memory (SSD and HDD) possibly mingled with an internal one (RAM). We provide an analytical evaluation of the performance, followed by an experimental validation, and we state that using SSD or HDD is fully suited to practical cases, which are identified.

Mots clés: Time memory trade-off; Rainbow tables; External memory

Domaines: Informatique [cs]

Florent Tardif, Gildas Avoine, Xavier Carpent, Barbara Kordy. How to Handle Rainbow Tables with External Memory. Australasian Conference on Information Security and Privacy, Paul Watters; Julian Jang-Jaccard, Jul 2017, Auckland, New Zealand. pp 306-323, ⟨10.1007/978-3-319-60055-0_16⟩. ⟨hal-01563841⟩