Safe-Cracker Distributed Network Code Breaking Project

Increasing complexity of encryption used by criminals presents an ongoing challenge to law enforcement agencies. Effective code breaking attack methods have been developed for attacking many of the cryptosystems used by criminals, however, frequently attacking these files requires mammoth amounts of CPU power achieved only through the coordinated effort of hundreds or thousands of computers. AccessData has developed such distributed code breaking software called Distributed Network Attack, or DNA. The Distributed Code Breaking Silo is a project in which universities and law enforcement agencies combine resources in order to create a managed code breaking hot spot called a silo. These silos are designed to be internet based and use a web front-end to make it easy for law enforcement agents in the field to submit the headers from encrypted files. The back-end of the silo is AccessData s DNA distributed code-breaking software which uses distributed computing resources to attack these difficult encryption problems. Technology does not currently exist to interconnect silo networks. The objective of this proposal is to architect the enhancements necessary to allow different silos to exchange information work collectively over insecure networks such as the Internet.