SAT-Based Cryptanalysis: From Parallel Computing to Volunteer Computing

Volunteer computing is a powerful tool for solving hard problems by the divide-and-conquer approach. During the last decade, several hard cryptanalysis problems were solved in the volunteer computing project SAT@home. In this study, the preliminary stage of these experiments are described: how SAT-based cryptanalysis problems are chosen; how these problems are studied on a computing cluster using state-of-the-art multithreaded SAT solvers; how decompositions of the chosen SAT problems are constructed using a Monte Carlo method; how server and client software are prepared for the corresponding experiments in SAT@home. These issues are described in application to several stream ciphers, for which it is planned to launch experiments in SAT@home.