This is a tool for brute forcing AES keys. It was developed with inspiration from AES Brute by unicornsasfuel. It was presented to DEFCON 27 under the talk Practical Key Search Attacks Against Modern Symmetric Ciphers.
This repo uses GNU make. The code has different dependencies depending on the program used. For the program presented at DEFCON, install cryptopp (aesburst-multi). Just clone the repository and then cd aes_burst and make. It's that simple!
After building, 2 programs are generated: aesburst-simple and aesburst-multi.
./<aesburst program name> for the usage message.
The test folder is for testing the implementation and benchmarking. Feel free to run any of the bash scripts to get an example of how to run the code.
This implementation is just to see if there is any performance increase from porting AES Brute from Python to C++. From our testing, this improved the performance slightly.
This implementation was the first attempt at parallelism. It uses a thread pool and allows the user to define the number of threads that will be used in the brute force. The threads each handle jobs from a queue, with each job being to handle a specific key. It saw a performance increase over the simple implementation in certain situations, but because of the limitations of AES-NI, the ideal number of threads correlates with the AES hardware on your processor.