ENENCRYPTION SCHEMESCRYPTION SCHEMES

Encryption is esentially the transformation of meaningful data

into non-meaningful data for the purposes of transportation
so that anyone without a secret decryption key can not read
the original meaningful data unless they are the intended
recipient of the data.
Privacy is ensured by keeping the information hidden from
anyone for whom it is not intended, even those who can see
the encrypted (meaningless) data. As a simple example it is
possible to encrypt files on a hard disk to prevent intruders
from reading them.
However, when the environment, where data is exchanged,
has many people transferring data within it, the risks of
intruders, be they passive (attempting to read the data) or
active (attempting to corrupt the data), increases to the
point of justifying that all data packets leaving a particular
node need to be encrypted.



Encryption allows secure communication over an insecure data
comunications channel. It works as follows:

1. The sender intends to send a message to the recipient. The
data is not to be seen by any other person that may also be
using the same environment.


2. The sender completes writing the message which when read
is meaningful. This is the plaintext.


3. He/She then encrypts the message with an encryption key.
There are different types of encryption discussed below.



4. The encrypted message is sent off down the insecure
communications channel to the intended recipient. The
message in this meaningless form is called the ciphertext.


5. On arrival of the encrypted message, the receiver decrypts
the ciphertext with the decryption key and reads the message.


6. While the ciphertext is in transit, an intruder, in order to read
the message, may try the following: - obtain the secret key (eg
by theft) or - recover the plaintext without using the secret key.


A secure Cryptosystem is one where the plaintext cannot be
recovered from the cipherte
Secret-key cryptography is a very straightforward agreement
between sender and receiver a message. Each party knows
and uses the same secret key.
It works very simply: 1. The sender uses the secret key to
encrypt the message.


2. The receiver uses the same secret key to decrypt the
message.


This form of cryptography has one hugely insecure factor.
How to keep the 'secret' key as a secret! The sender and
receiver must agree on the secret key (usually text of some
form, similiar to a login password) without any other party
finding out.

If they are in separate physical locations, communication is
required to agree on the key. They must trust a courier, the
phone system, or some other transmission system to ensure
that the secret key being communicated is not disclosed to
anyone else but the two parties.Anyone who overhears or
intercepts the key while in transit is capable of decrypting and
thus reading all messages encrypted using that key.
This is the generation, transmission and
storage of keys. All cryptosystems have
to deal with key management issues.
Secret-key cryptography often has
difficulty providing secure key
management due to the insecurity of
agreeing on a secret key in the first
place.
Diffie and Hellman solved the key
management problem in 1976 by inventing
Public-key cryptography. This cryptosystem
is based on the idea that each person gets
a pair of keys, called a public key and a
private key. Every user gets their public key
published but the private key is kept secret.
So the sender and receiver need not have
to agree on, and communicate secret
information (ie a key).

All communication involves public keys only. No private key is
ever transmitted or shared. So trusting some communications
channel to be secure against eavesdropping or betrayal is no
longer an issue. The most important requirement is that no party
can figure out the private key from the corresponding public
key.
Any sender can send a confidential message just using the
intended recipient's public key, but it can only be decrypted
with the private key solely in the possession of the receiver.
Furthermore, public-key cryptography aswell as being used for
privacy (encryption), can also be used for authentication
(digital signatures - discussed below).
How Public-key cryptography functions: 1. The sender wishes to send
a message to the receiver


2. He/She looks up the receiver's public key in a directory


3. The public key is used to encrypt the message and it is sent off


4. The receiver uses his/her private key to decrypt the message and
read it.


5. No other party listening in can decrypt the message.


6. Anyone can send an encrypted message to the receiver but only
the receiver can read it.
RSA was invented in 1977 by Ron Rivest,
Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman. It is a
public-key cryptosystem used for the
purposes of both encryption and
authentication.


1. Take two large primes, p and q.


2. Find their product n = pq; n is called the "modulus".


3. Choose a number, e, less than n.


4. e must also be relatively prime to (p-1)(q-1).


5. Find its inverse, d, mod (p-1)(q-1).

6. This means that ed = 1 mod (p-1)(q-1).


7. e and d are called the public and private exponents,
respectively.


8. The public key is the pair (n,e) and the private key is d.


9. The factors p and q must be kept secret, or destroyed.



It is presumed to be too difficult to obtain the private key
d from the public key (n,e). This is the fundamental irony
of RSA. We could call this both a flaw and an adequately
good enough security measure. If an intruder could
factor n into p and q, then he could obtain the private
key d
1. The sender wants to send a private message, m, to the receiver.


2. The sender creates the ciphertext c by exponentiating: c = m^e mod
n, where e and n are the receiver's public key.


3. To decrypt, the receiver performs the exponentiation: m = c^d mod n,
and recovers the original message m.


4. The relationship between e and d ensures that the receiver correctly
recovers m.


5. Since only the receiver knows d, only he/she can decrypt the
message.



While encryption dates back to the times of Caesar,
digital signatures are more recent. This is due to the
proliferation of digital communications and in this context
the exponential growth of the Web.
Authentication is the use of digital signatures and holds the
same function and meaning for digital documents as
handwritten signatures do for printed documents. In paper
and ink terms, a signature is an unforgeable piece of
information unique to a particular person who has written
or has agreed with the contents of the document where
their signature is attached.
The recipient (as well as a third party) can verify that the
document did originate from the person whose signature
is attached and also that the document has not been
tampered with since it was signed and dispatched.

The same concepts hold for electronic messages. Authentication in the
context of Web Security is where the receiver of a digital data message
can be confident of the identity of the sender and of the validity of the
message.

Popular examples of authentication protocols in use today are: secret-
key cryptosystem: DES, public-key system: RSA (detailed below)
Authentication in public-key systems uses digital signatures.
All secure cryptosystems consist of two parts: The method of signing the
document at the senders end, making forgery an impossibility, and the
method of verifying that the signature was actually generated by the
real sender, at the receivers end.
The advantages and disadvantages: The obvious
advantage of public-key cryptography is increased
security in that the private keys need not ever be
communicated, transmitted or revealed to anyone.


This, in contrast, is the insecurity of a secret-key system.
There is always the possiblility that another rogue party
could discover the secret key while it is being transmitted
for agreement purposes.


From the authentication point of view public-key systems
are a major advantage in that they can provide a
method for digital signatures.

".

Authentication via a secret-key system would require the sharing of some
secret key and sometimes requires trust of a third party as well. A sender
could then deny any association with a previously signed message by
claiming that the shared secret was somehow compromised by one of
the parties sharing the secret.

However this conflict would never arrive using public-key authentication
because each user is responsible for protecting his/her private key. This
property of public-key authentication is called "non-repudiation".

From the judicial point of view, digitally signed messages can be proved
authentic to a third party, such as a judge, thus allowing such messages
to be legally binding.






The major disadvantage of using public-key cryptography for
encryption is speed of encrypting a message before dispatching
it. Most popular Secret-key encryption methods are significantly
faster than any public- key encryption methods currently
available. So obviously the trade-off involves secure key
management against speed.


A compromise is achieved where public-key cryptography can
share the burden with secret-key cryptography to get the best of
both worlds.


In order to utilise both the security advantages of
public-key systems, and the speed advantages of
secret-key systems, the solution is to combine public-
and secret-key systems.
Initially the public-key system can be used to encrypt
a secret key. The secret is probably small in size, so
speed of encryption is not important. Once such a
key has been securely communicated between
patries, it is then used to encrypt a complete file or
message. This may be large in size, but the sender
and receiver have the assurance that it is being
encrypted as quickly as possibly and that the secret-
key has been shared using a sound secure method.
This is indeed the case in RSA

Public-key cryptography is not meant to
replace secret-key cryptography, but
rather to supplement it, to make it more
secure. The first use of public- key
techniques is for secure key exchange in
an (otherwise) speedy secret-key system.
Hence secret-key cryptography is still
extremely important