In this workshop led by Mate Soos (PhD in INRIA Rhone-Alpes) we will take a distributed SAT solver design that works similar to SETI@Home and hack it until it works faster, gives better results. The results will be public and the solver downloadable, along with the server to enable anyone to crack much-hyped but useless crypto-systems using collaborative effort.

SAT solvers are mathematical tools that solve problems given in the CNF notation. Since all problems can be described in CNF, in particular, cryptographical problems, SAT solvers can be used to crack ciphers. They have already been used to solve Crypto-1, used in London (20 seconds to break the encryption…) and HiTag2, used in car immobilizers.
Difficult cryptographic routines such as those used in WPA (wireless internet access), SSL (bank transactions), etc. need much more computing power than older ciphers. This means SAT solvers must be designed to work in a distributed environment, and work similar to SETI@Home or Folding@Home.

Date: September 10, 2009
Location: /tmp/lab, near Paris
More info+Registration: Worskshop page