Abstract
Client puzzles are moderately-hard cryptographic problems — neither easy nor impossible to solve — that can be used as a countermeasure against denial of service attacks on network protocols. Puzzles based on modular exponentiation are attractive as they provide important properties such as non-parallelisability, deterministic solving time, and linear granularity. We propose an efficient client puzzle based on modular exponentiation. Our puzzle requires only a few modular multiplications for puzzle generation and verification. For a server under denial of service attack, this is a significant improvement as the best known non-parallelisable puzzle proposed by Karame and Čapkun (ESORICS 2010) requires at least 2k-bit modular exponentiation, where k is a security parameter. We show that our puzzle satisfies the unforgeability and difficulty properties defined by Chen et al. (Asiacrypt 2009). We present experimental results which show that, for 1024-bit moduli, our proposed puzzle can be up to 30 × faster to verify than the Karame-Čapkun puzzle and 99 × faster than the Rivest et al.’s time-lock puzzle.
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Rangasamy, J., Stebila, D., Kuppusamy, L., Boyd, C., Gonzalez Nieto, J. (2012). Efficient Modular Exponentiation-Based Puzzles for Denial-of-Service Protection. In: Kim, H. (eds) Information Security and Cryptology - ICISC 2011. ICISC 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7259. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31912-9_21
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