Password Cracking Based On Rainbow Tables With A Dynamically Coarse Grain Reconfigurable Architecture

Rainbow attack is a very efficient attack which uses rainbow tables to offer an almost optimal time-memory tradeoff in the process of recovering the plaintext password from ciphertext hash. In this paper, we proposed a new method which can crack DES password quickly with less power consumption on a coarse grain reconfigurable architecture (CGRA) named reconfigurable encrypt-decrypt system (REEDS). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first try for password cracking based on “Rainbow Tables” under a dynamically CGRA platform presented in the literature. High parallel computing capability and good flexibility make the platform an excellent candidate to process multimedia application, encryption and decryption algorithm etc. In this paper, the whole work of DES password cracking based on rainbow tables is split into several sub tasks, which are mapped onto REEDS respectively and executed in parallel using pipeline approach. Experimental results show that the proposed system with 200 MHz clock rate can fulfill the DES password cracking task with great performance, which is up to 2000 times faster than the corresponding software approach. Moreover, it only consumes 194mW power which is less than the FPGA-based system or the GPU-based system.