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Cryptographic Techniques

The document discusses basic concepts in cryptography including encryption, decryption and keys. It also covers classical ciphers, cryptoanalysis, perfect secrecy, unicity distance and block ciphers.

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22 views

Cryptographic Techniques

The document discusses basic concepts in cryptography including encryption, decryption and keys. It also covers classical ciphers, cryptoanalysis, perfect secrecy, unicity distance and block ciphers.

Uploaded by

epicsmurfc2
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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SENG2250 Cryptographic Techniques – 30/7/21

Cryptography: the study of transforming a plaintext into a ciphertext and then transforming the
ciphertext back into the plaintext

Cryptoanalysis: the study of transforming a ciphertext back into the original plaintext without
knowledge of the key

Basic Concepts –

- Plaintext (P): the original clear message (M)


- Ciphertext (C): the transformed message
- Cipher: an algorithm for transforming or encrypting or ciphering a clear message into
Ciphertext with which any unauthorized party cannot find the plaintext
- Key (K): a data unit for encipher/deciphering or encryption/decryption
- Encipher/encrypt (EK): the process of converting plaintext to cipher text using a cipher
(E) and a key (K)
- Decipher/decrypt (DK): the process of converting cipher text back into plaintext using a
cipher (D) and a key (K)
- Encryption and decryp0tion are sometimes referred to as enciphering and deciphering
respectively

The Basic Secrecy Channel –

Key Dependence –

- The transformations are not universal, they are key dependent. The key K controls the
transformation and is known only by Alice and Bob. The key is secret
- If a transformation does not depend on a key, it is referred to as encoding, with the
inverse transformation being referred to as decoding
o Morse code
o ASCII code
o Base64
- Confusingly if this follows this definition through, once we have chosen a key, we can
encode a message with a particular (now fixed) transformation
Models of Encryption and Decryption –

- Symmetric key encryption: Encryption key and decryption key are the same
- Asymmetric key encryption: Encryption key and decryption key are different

Classical Ciphers

- Principle to a cipher
o Substitution (replace): leads to confusion
o Permutation ( reorder): leads to diffusion
- Some classical ciphers
o Caesar cipher
o Vigenère cipher – (lab discovery)

Cryptoanalysis –

- Decrypt ciphertext to reveal the plaintext without the key


- Ciphertext only attack
o Known ciphertext only
- Known plaintext attack
o Known substantial amount of (plaintext, ciphertext) pairs
- Chosen ciphertext attack
o Have access to the cipher under an unknown key
o Can choose special plaintext and/or ciphertext

Statistical analysis –

- No classical ciphers are secure against cryptoanalysis


- Statistical properties of plaintext language can be used to cancel many keys in one step
and enable the cryptanalyst to find the key without trying all of them
- Frequency grouping
o Group letters by frequency as they appear in the cipher text
o Compare this to the frequency of letters in the English language
o Using this info, you can exclude certain keys due to them being more unlikely
o Also, the use of bigrams and trigrams (dual and triple letter combinations) can
help reduce this further
o Note: Frequency counts are only clues to the actual key used so it is not exact
Perfect Secrecy –

- Using the knowledge of the plaintext languages, a set of possible plaintexts are
determined with certain probability
- In a system with perfect secrecy, knowledge of the cryptogram does not help the enemy
- P(X = x) = P(X=x|Y=y), ∀ x,y
- They are just as likely to guess the plaintext associated with a ciphertext after they see
the ciphertext as they are before they see it

Theorem (Shannon) –

- In a system with perfect secrecy the number of keys is at least equal to the number of
messages
- This tells us that to achieve perfect secrecy in practice, many key bits must be
exchanged. This is not practical.
- How can we measure security then if we know it probably isn’t perfect?
- Shannon proposed unicity distance as the measure of security

Unicity Distance –

N0 is the least number of ciphertext characters needed to determine the key uniquely. If there are E
keys and they are chosen with uniform probability, unicity distance is given by:

( log2 E)
N0 =
d
Where d is the redundancy of the plaintext language

Redundancy and Rates –

- Redundancy of a language is defined in terms of the rates of the language


o d = R-r bits
- The absolute rate R of a language is the minimum number of bits to represent each
character, assuming characters are equally likely and emitted independently. For an
alphabet of size, A
o R = log2A
- The true rate r of a language is the average number of bits required to represent
characters of that language. This uses the real probability distribution of characters
- For English:
o R ≈ 4.7 bits, r ≈ 1-1.5 bits, d ≈ 3.2 bits
- True rate is always smaller than absolute rate, and the difference is the redundancy
- All natural languages are redundant, for example:
o Bb invitd Alic fr dinr, bt sh rfusd.
- This sentence is readable because we can fill all the missing characters: that is, all the
missing characters are redundant
- Redundancy is related to structure
- A truly random source has no redundancy
o Mmhfcdacxnvgdvvdfpnfuipawedka
- Every character in this string in necessary: if one of them is omitted the information it
carries is lost and cannot be recovered
- Redundancy occurs because of the non-uniform letter frequencies, bigram and trigram
frequencies an other grammatical structures of the language

Measuring Security –

- We can use unicity distance as a measure to compare the security of various ciphers
- Recall that we presented security as being about protecting assets against possible
threats

Block Cipher –

- In a block cipher algorithm, plaintext bits are grouped into blocks and then processed
- Fixed length input -> fixed length output
- Block size and key size are 2 important parameters to the security of such algorithms
- Some attacks
o Dictionary attack
o Meet in the middle attack

Data Encryption Standard (DES) –

- Data Encryption Standard developed by IBM and adopted by NIST with NSA approval for
US government unclassified information
- Block Cipher
- Key size: 56 bits
- Block size: 64 bits

- Key space: 256(Can be reduced by attacks ☹)


- Substitution (S-box) and permutation (P-box)
- Feistel Structure

DES Structure –

- The function f is a non-linear transformation and is the source of the cryptographic


strength of DES.
- IP is the initial permutation, has no cryptographic significance
- IP is used to facilitate getting vits onto the chip in VLSI DES

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