Coding and Cryptography Computer Cluster (CCCC)

Current project

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 F_2¹¹³ 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