Custom hardware attack

<h2 id="history">History</h2>
<p>The earliest custom hardware attack may have been the <a href="/facts/Bombe/PR64Llq7">Bombe</a> used to recover <a href="/facts/Enigma_machine/FSMJwbCL">Enigma machine</a> keys in <a href="/facts/World_War_II/2efV5L1U">World War II</a>.  In 1998, a custom hardware attack was mounted against the <a href="/facts/Data_Encryption_Standard/STfBjTGb">Data Encryption Standard</a> cipher by the <a href="/facts/Electronic_Frontier_Foundation/vCy44tuo">Electronic Frontier Foundation</a>. Their "<a href="/facts/EFF_DES_cracker/j3BIL9Gn">Deep Crack</a>" machine cost U.S. $250,000 to build and decrypted the <a href="/facts/DES_Challenges/6g51X9jP">DES Challenge II-2</a> test message after 56 hours of work.  The only other confirmed DES cracker was the <a href="http://www.sciengines.com/copacobana/index.html">COPACOBANA</a> machine (Cost-Optimized PArallel COde Breaker) built in 2006. Unlike Deep Crack, COPACOBANA consists of commercially available FPGAs (reconfigurable logic gates). COPACOBANA costs about $10,000<a class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:3" href="#fn:3"><sup>3</sup></a> to build and will recover a <a href="/facts/Data_Encryption_Standard/STfBjTGb">DES</a> key in under 6.4 days on average. The cost decrease by roughly a factor of 25 over the EFF machine is an impressive example of the continuous improvement of <a href="/facts/Digital_hardware/3kJcKbkw">digital hardware</a>. Adjusting for inflation over 8 years yields an even higher improvement of about 30x. Since 2007, <a href="/facts/SciEngines_GmbH/boVIhdtb">SciEngines GmbH</a>, a spin-off company of the two project partners of COPACOBANA has enhanced and developed successors of COPACOBANA. In 2008, their COPACOBANA RIVYERA reduced the time to break DES to the current record of less than one day, using 128 Spartan-3 5000's.<a class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:4" href="#fn:4"><sup>4</sup></a> It is generally believed that large government code breaking organizations, such as the U.S. <a href="/facts/National_Security_Agency/Sg6MGV1o">National Security Agency</a>, make extensive use of custom hardware attacks, but no examples have been <a href="/facts/Classified_information/og7wn3tD">declassified</a> or leaked as of 2005.
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<h2 id="see-also">See also</h2>
<ul><li><a href="/facts/TWIRL/EoRLYfuR">TWIRL</a></li>
<li><a href="/facts/TWINKLE/UA9raHHb">TWINKLE</a></li></ul>

<h2 id="external-links">External links</h2>
<ul><li><a href="http://www.sciengines.com/copacobana/index.html">COPACOBANA, Cost Optimized Code Breaker and Analyzer</a></li></ul>

<h2 id="references">References</h2>

<ol>
<li id="fn:1"><p>Jindal, Poonam; Abou Houran, Mohamad; Goyal, Deepam; Choudhary, Anurag (2023-06-01). "A review of different techniques used to design photonic crystal-based logic gates". Optik. 280: 170794. doi:10.1016/j.ijleo.2023.170794. ISSN 0030-4026. S2CID 257725561. <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0030402623002905" target="_blank">https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0030402623002905</a> <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-back-ref">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn:2"><p>Navaraj, William Taube; Gupta, Shoubhik; Lorenzelli, Leandro; Dahiya, Ravinder (April 2018). "Wafer Scale Transfer of Ultrathin Silicon Chips on Flexible Substrates for High Performance Bendable Systems". Advanced Electronic Materials. 4 (4): 1700277. doi:10.1002/aelm.201700277. S2CID 85547788. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1002%2Faelm.201700277" target="_blank">https://doi.org/10.1002%2Faelm.201700277</a> <a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-back-ref">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn:3"><p>Gerd Pfeiffer; Christof Paar; Jan Pelzl; Sandeep Kumar; Andy Rupp; Manfred Schimmler. How to Break DES for EUR 8,980 (PDF). SHARCS 2006. <a href="http://www.copacobana.org/paper/copacobana_SHARCS2006.pdf" target="_blank">http://www.copacobana.org/paper/copacobana_SHARCS2006.pdf</a> <a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-back-ref">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn:4"><p>Break DES in less than a single day Archived 2011-07-16 at the Wayback Machine [Press release of firm, demonstrated at a 2009 workshop] <a href="http://www.sciengines.com/company/news-a-events/74-des-in-1-day.html?eab1dd0ce8f296f6302f76f8761818c0=0b59c5b91984fe01986ef3bbc6de9871" target="_blank">http://www.sciengines.com/company/news-a-events/74-des-in-1-day.html?eab1dd0ce8f296f6302f76f8761818c0=0b59c5b91984fe01986ef3bbc6de9871</a> <a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-back-ref">↩</a></p></li>
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Custom hardware attack open-in-new

Custom hardware attack