How to Sequentialize Independent Parallel Attacks? - Biased Distributions Have a Phase Transition

8 years 4 days ago

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Abstract. We assume a scenario where an attacker can mount several independent attacks on a single CPU. Each attack can be run several times in independent ways. Each attack can succeed after a given number of steps with some given and known probability. A natural question is to wonder what is the optimal strategy to run steps of the attacks in a sequence. In this paper, we develop a formalism to tackle this problem. When the number of attacks is inﬁnite, we show that there is a magic number of steps m such that the optimal strategy is to run an attack for m steps and to try again with another attack until one succeeds. We also study the case of a ﬁnite number of attacks. We describe this problem when the attacks are exhaustive key searches, but the result is more general. We apply our result to the learning parity with noise (LPN) problem and the password search problem. Although the optimal m decreases as the distribution is more biased, we observe a phase transition in all cases...

Sonia Bogos, Serge Vaudenay

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