The Compressed Storage in Time Memory Tradeoff Attack

Abstract

Time memory tradeoff (TMTO) attack is an important and practical cryptanalytic technique for inverting random functions. Actually, it is almost the only sufficiently effective method to recover keys or passwords of an encryption system in a time constrained attack environment. In this paper, we investigate the table storage problem in the pre-computation phase that is an essential consideration in the TMTO attack. After exploiting the structure and lookup operation of the table, we propose several compression ways to ensure the table elements storage more efficient, which brings a lot of benefit for the online search phase in the attack. Furthermore, we provide explicit experiment results to demonstrate the efficiency improvement derived from the application of these compression strategies.