Low-cost client puzzles based on modular exponentiation

Abstract

Client puzzles have been proposed as a useful mechanism for mitigating Denial of Service attacks on network protocols. While several puzzles have been proposed in recent years, most existing non-parallelizable puzzles are based on modular exponentiations. The main drawback of these puzzles is in the high cost that they incur on the puzzle generator (the verifier). In this paper, we propose cryptographic puzzles based on modular exponentiation that reduce this overhead. Our constructions are based on a reasonable intractability assumption in RSA: essentially the difficulty of computing a small private exponent when the public key is larger by several orders of magnitude than the semi-prime modulus. We also discuss puzzle constructions based on CRT-RSA [11]. Given a semi-prime modulus N, the costs incurred on the verifier in our puzzle are decreased by a factor of when compared to existing modular exponentiation puzzles, where k is a security parameter. We further show how our puzzle can be integrated in a number of protocols, including those used for the remote verification of computing performance of devices and for the protection against Denial of Service attacks. We validate the performance of our puzzle on PlanetLab nodes. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.