APPLICATIONS

A team of French researchers from the Central Office for Information Systems Security (DCSSI) and the University of Versailles-Saint Quentin en Yvelines has computed a collision for “SHA-0” code, a hash algorithm developed in the 1990s by the National Security Agency. The computation was performed on TeraNova, a supercomputer clustering Bull NovaScale servers. TeraNova demonstrated its power and reliability by breaking SHA-0 in three weeks and 80,000 CPU hours. “Since 1998, progress in algorithms has led to a 1,000-factor improvement in the complexity of the SHA-0 attack. Even so, we could not have created a collision so quickly and easily without the support of a supercomputer as fast and flexible as TeraNova,” said Antoine Joux, Scientific Advisor to DGA/SPOTI (Délégation Générale pour l’Armement) and previously DCSSI Chief Scientist delegate. “The computing power of TeraNova considerably increased our research capabilities,” underlined Professor William Jalby. “For this grand computation challenge, we were also greatly assisted by software solutions from CAPS-Entreprise and Bull.” Delivering 1.3 teraflops, the TeraNova cluster of 16 servers, each equipped with 16 Intel Itanium 2 processors, operates within the Ter@tec project at the DAM Ile de France Centre of CEA (Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique - French nuclear power agency). Ter@tec was created to promote the use of digital simulation and high-performance IT through scientific co-operation between partners in research and industry worldwide, among them Bull and the University of Versailles–Saint Quentin en Yvelines. To address the growing security concerns related to data access and IT exchanges, dedicated solutions are based on increasingly complex coding and hashing algorithms. In this context, one major focus of scientific community research involves the analysis of potential weaknesses in the algorithms currently in use. This major contribution to the improvement of security mechanisms against increasing attacks of all kinds requires massive computing power to be validated. Resulting from an outstanding co-operation between the French research community and industry, this success recognises the achievements of Antoine Joux in the algorithmic field, as he created the algorithm which led to breaking the code. He found two identical fingerprints from different files in 251 computational steps instead of the 280 attributed in theory to this algorithm. It also is a tribute to the work of Professor William Jalby’s team at the University of Versailles-Saint Quentin en Yvelines in the field of optimising codes on high-end processors. “Intel Itanium 2-based servers have enabled a real breakthrough in research by significantly increasing the volume of data that can be processed,” said Tom Garrison Enterprise Marketing Director of Intel. The results are also a tribute to the quality of French research in cryptography, to the efficiency of the Bull NovaScale® series in both the scientific and industrial fields, as well as to the expertise of the team at the University of Versailles-Saint Quentin en Yvelines in optimising the performance of programs running on Itanium-based systems. “We are proud to have taken an active part in the success of a key technology challenge, which is at the heart of world-wide concerns in terms of security,” said Gérard Roucairol, Chief Scientist of Bull. “With TeraNova, Bull once again demonstrates its capacity to meet the biggest challenges in research.” To learn more : http://www.nsrl.nist.gov/collision.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-1 http://www.financialcryptography.com/mt/archives/000199.html