¹Viale del Policlinico, 137, Rome, Italy
²Dipartimento di Informatica Universit`a “La Sapienza”, Rome, Italy
³Servizio Polizia Postale e delle Comunicazioni

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Abstract—We describe a distributed computing platform to carry out large scale dictionary attacks against cryptosystems compliant to the OpenPGP standard. Moreover, we describe a simplified mechanism to quickly test passphrases that might protect a specified private key ring. Only passphrases that pass this test complete the (much more time consuming) full validation procedure. This approach greatly reduces the time required to test a set of possible passphrases.

Index Terms—OpenPGP, Volunteer computing, Middleware.

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Cite: Massimo Bernaschi, Mauro Bisson, Emanuele Gabrielli, Simone Tacconi, "An Architecture for Distributed Dictionary Attacks to Cryptosystems," Journal of Computers vol. 4, no. 5, pp. 378-386, 2009.