Cuteforce Analyzer: A Distributed Bruteforce Attack on PDF Encryption with GPUs and FPGAs

Abstract

Working on cryptanalytic tasks using a heterogeneous cluster with different types of processors (CPU, GPU, FPGA) can be an advantage over classical homogeneous clusters. In this paper we demonstrate that distributing crypt analytics tasks to different types of processors can lead to better performance than can be achieved using a single type of processor. To this end we have built a framework for the management of a heterogeneous cluster and implented a password brute forcer for password protected PDF documents. Our results show that such a framework can be implemented with little overhead in terms of performance.