Question
Ruritania develops a cyber warfare unit, the RCW, which employs cryptanalysts tasked with gaining access to the email account of the president of an enemy
Ruritania develops a cyber warfare unit, the RCW, which employs cryptanalysts tasked with gaining access to the email account of the president of an enemy state, Oceania. A spearphishing attack yields the login credentials of a junior system administrator for Oceanias government information systems, and this in turn results in the RCW learning the presidents username and the complementary information for their password. The complementary information takes the form of a checksum formed by applying a cryptographic hash function to the presidents password. An offline dictionary attack on the presidents complementary information fails, so the RCW resorts to a brute-force attempt to generate the presidents password. The RCW: Knows the cryptographic hash function used to calculate the checksum; Knows that passwords in Ocianias systems are case sensitive, comprised of a mix of upper and lower-case letters (a..z and A..Z) and are 8 characters long; Allocates a massively parallel computing cluster to the task. This consists of 1000 processors. Each is capable of generating a candidate password, applying the cryptographic hash function and comparing the resulting checksum to the presidents password checksum every 10 milliseconds. i. To two decimal places, what is the probability of the RCW generating the presidents password within twelve months? Use Andersons formula and show your working. (5 marks) ii. Why might the RCW succeed in gaining access to the presidents email account, even if they do not generate the presidents actual password? (2 marks) iii. Suggest two measures that Ocianias system administrators could take to make the presidents password harder to discover.
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