SBIR-STTR Award

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.

AccessData is proposing enhancements to its Distributed Network Attack (DNA) product to increase the functionality which will increase the number of workstations that can participate in the system; from approximately 1,000 to potentially 1,000,000 workstations. This will be accomplished by coupling its world class password attack technology with a proven open source desktop grid computing infrastructure (BOINC) that leverages the unused CPU cycles of existing end-user workstations deployed within an organization. The resulting product will be called DNA-Grid. DNA-Grid will be available as an upgrade to organizations already running DNA. A deployment of DNA-Grid which permits the submission of files via the Internet over an authenticated, secure (HTTPS), connection will allow small law enforcement agencies to gain access to the computing power of the system at a reasonable cost