were removed would ILP be applied on the resulting
sub-instances.
A key feature of this approach is that LP is used
repeatedly and the bits to be removed are dynami-
cally determined by subsequent applications of LP.
This leads to a greater shrinkage of the solution space.
As proof of concept, we considered the removal of 50
rightmost bits in Regime H in two steps - removal of
30 bits first followed by the removal of 20 bits. The
success probability increased from 20% for a one-shot
removal to 26% in the 2-step case. In the 5-step case
(removal of 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 bits), the success
probability increased to 32%. In the case of removal
of just 20 bits in Regime H, the success probability
increased by 20% for a 4-step removal (5 + 5 + 5 + 5
bits) over a single step removal.
One possible advantage of multi-step removal is
that it may be likely to prune the search tree in Figure
4. For example, it may be possible to rank the dif-
ferent sub-instances based on presumed probability
of success heuristically computed from the LP out-
puts. Root-to-leaf paths deemed to have greater suc-
cess probability could be explored first resulting in
much reduced execution time.
5 CONCLUSION
We addressed the challenge posed by (Galbraith,
2013) to obtain the plaintext in a ciphertext only at-
tack for m = 640. We were able to solve the challenge
for 5 instances out of 1000 (in 1 day with 150 cores)
and for 10 instances (in 2 days with 2400 cores). We
applied LP/ILP on reduced instances by removing bits
in different regimes - L, M and H. We found that it
was most effective to remove bits in H. A sub-instance
of size 550 can be solved with 97% success proba-
bility by removing just 90 bits in H. We performed
an optimization wherein we removed bits in smaller
blocks rather than in one go and obtained significant
improvement in success rate. While our initial re-
sults are based on experiments with 1000 random in-
stances, we generated and tested another 1000 ran-
dom instances and our conclusions are nearly identi-
cal. Finally, we outlined a very simple way to catego-
rize instances into classes A, B and C where instances
in A are easiest to solve while instances in C are hard-
est.
The approach and experiments reported here,
while simple, were partially successful in trying to
address Galbraith’s challenge. Through insightful re-
finements and optimizations, we feel it may be possi-
ble to greatly increase the success rate while decreas-
ing the execution time.
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