What is ...

# What is Encryption?

Encryption is the transformation of data into a form unreadable by anyone without a secret decryption key. Its purpose is to ensure privacy by keeping the information hidden from anyone for whom it is not intended, even those who can see the encrypted data. For example, one may wish to encrypt files on a hard disk to prevent an intruder from reading them.

In a multi-user setting, encryption allows secure communication over an insecure channel. The general scenario is as follows: Alice wishes to send a message to Bob so that no one else besides Bob can read it. Alice encrypts the message, which is called the plaintext, with an encryption key; the encrypted message, called the ciphertext, is sent to Bob. Bob decrypts the ciphertext with the decryption key and reads the message. An attacker, Charlie, may either try to obtain the secret key or to recover the plaintext without using the secret key. In a secure cryptosystem, the plaintext cannot be recovered from the ciphertext except by using the decryption key. In a symmetric cryptosystem, a single key serves as both the encryption and decryption keys.

# What is authentication? What is a digital signature?

Authentication is a process where the receiver of a digital message can be confident of the identity of the sender and/or the integrity of the message.

Digital signature is an unforgeable piece of data asserting that a named person wrote or otherwise agreed to the document that is signed. The recipient, as well as a third party, can verify both that the document did indeed originate from the person whose signature is attached and that the document has not been altered since it was signed. A secure digital signature system thus consists of two parts: a method of signing a document such that forgery is infeasible, and a method of verifying that a signature was actually generated by whomever it represents. Furthermore, secure digital signatures cannot be repudiated; i.e., the signer of a document cannot later disown it by claiming it was forged.

# What is secret-key(symmetric) cryptography?

Secret-key cryptography is based on the sender and receiver of a message knowing and using the same secret key: the sender uses the secret key to encrypt the message, and the receiver uses the same secret key to decrypt the message. The main problem is getting the sender and receiver to agree on the secret key without anyone else finding out. If they are in separate physical locations, they must trust a courier, or a phone system, or some other transmission system to not disclose the secret key being communicated. Anyone who overhears or intercepts the key in transit can later read all messages encrypted using that key. The generation, transmission and storage of keys is called key management; all cryptosystems must deal with key management issues. Secret-key cryptography often has difficulty providing secure key management.

# What is public-key (assymetric) cryptography?

Public-key cryptography was invented in 1976 by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman in order to solve the key management problem. In the new system, each person gets a pair of keys, called the public key and the private key. Each person's public key is published while the private key is kept secret. The need for sender and receiver to share secret information is eliminated: all communications involve only public keys, and no private key is ever transmitted or shared. No longer is it necessary to trust some communications channel to be secure against eavesdropping or betrayal. Anyone can send a confidential message just using public information, but it can only be decrypted with a private key that is in the sole possession of the intended recipient. Furthermore, public-key cryptography can be used for authentication (digital signatures) as well as for privacy (encryption).

# What are the advantages and disadvantages of public-key cryptography over secret-key cryptography?

The primary advantage of public-key cryptography is increased security: the private keys do not ever need to transmitted or revealed to anyone. In a secret-key system, by contrast, there is always a chance that an enemy could discover the secret key while it is being transmitted.

Another major advantage of public-key systems is that they can provide a method for digital signatures. Authentication via secret-key systems requires the sharing of some secret and sometimes requires trust of a third party as well. A sender can then repudiate a previously signed message by claiming that the shared secret was somehow compromised by one of the parties sharing the secret. For example, the Kerberos secret-key authentication system involves a central database that keeps copies of the secret keys of all users; a Kerberos-authenticated message would most likely not be held legally binding, since an attack on the database would allow widespread forgery. Public-key authentication, on the other hand, prevents this type of repudiation; each user has sole responsibility for protecting his or her private key. This property of public-key authentication is often called non-repudiation.

Furthermore, digitally signed messages can be proved authentic to a third party, such as a judge, thus allowing such messages to be legally binding. Secret-key authentication systems such as Kerberos were designed to authenticate access to network resources, rather than to authenticate documents, a task which is better achieved via digital signatures.

A disadvantage of using public-key cryptography for encryption is speed: there are popular secret-key encryption methods which are significantly faster than any currently available public-key encryption method. But public-key cryptography can share the burden with secret-key cryptography to get the best of both worlds.

For encryption, the best solution is to combine public- and secret-key systems in order to get both the security advantages of public-key systems and the speed advantages of secret-key systems. The public-key system can be used to encrypt a secret key which is then used to encrypt the bulk of a file or message. This is explained in more detail in How is RSA used for encryption in practice? In the case of 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 was for secure key exchange in an otherwise secret-key system, this is still one of its primary functions.

# What is a hash function? What is a digest?

A hash function H is a transformation that takes a variable-size input m and returns a fixed-size string, which is called the hash value h or the digest (that is, h = H(m)). Hash functions with just this property have a variety of general computational uses, but when employed in cryptography the hash functions are usually chosen to have some additional properties.

One can think of a digest as a "digital fingerprint" of the larger document - result produced by the hash function.

# Why should I use digest at all?

Perhaps the main role of a cryptographic hash function is in the provision of digital signatures. Since hash functions are generally faster than digital signature algorithms, it is typical to compute the digital signature to some document by computing the signature on the document's hash value, which is small compared to the document itself.

Additionally, a digest can be made public without revealing the contents of the document from which it is derived.

# What is AES? Why is AES so important? Is this mostly used secret-key algorithm?

AES is Advanced Encryption Standard, approved by Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS-197). This standard specifies Rijndael as a FIPS-approved symmetric encryption algorithm that may be used by U.S. Government organizations (and others) to protect sensitive information.

The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) specifies cryptographic algorithm that can be used to protect electronic data. The AES algorithm is a symmetric block cipher that can encrypt (encipher) and decrypt (decipher) information. Encryption converts data to an unintelligible form called ciphertext; decrypting the ciphertext converts the data back into its original form, called plaintext. The AES algorithm is capable of using cryptographic keys of 128, 192, and 256 bits to encrypt and decrypt data in blocks of 128 bits.

Above document marks the culmination of a four-year effort involving the cooperation between the U.S. Government, and private industry and academia from around the world to develop an encryption technique that has the potential to be used by millions of people in the years to come. AES is used widely - both in USA and internationally.

# What is RSA?

RSA is a public-key cryptosystem for both encryption and authentication; it was invented in 1977 by Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman. It uses large primes to generate public key and private key.

It is difficult (presumably) to obtain the private key from the public key. If one could factor these large primes, however, then one could obtain the private key. Thus the security of RSA is related to the assumption that factoring is difficult. An easy factoring method or some other feasible attack would "break" RSA.

RSA can be used for security (encryption), confidentiality (signature), and key exchange purposes. It is often used for signature and key exchange only, since the encryption and decryption are very slow.

Platforms

Windows