Visual cryptanalysis

Abstract

In this paper we describe a new paradigm for carrying out massively parallel computations such as brute force cryptanalysis of encryption schemes. It uses photographic films to store the internal state of a bit-sliced computation, and contact printing to carry out the computational steps. While it does not have the exponential speedup of quantum computation or the potential parallelism of DNA computation, it seems to be more practical since it is based on simple commercially available technology. In the last part of the paper we consider hybrid electronic/photographic computations, which combine the advantages of the two models of computation.