# Tag Info

13

What you're looking for can be done using existing schemes for format preserving encryption (FPE). In general, FPE schemes convert an existing strong algorithm like AES into a block cipher that operates on a set of any size. For instance, FPE can encrypt 15 digit integers to other 15 digit integers (eg for credit card numbers, one of the common reasons for ...

7

The Vigenère cipher has many weaknesses, but perhaps the most obvious ones are: An attacker, who knows (or can guess) as many consecutive characters of any plaintext message as there are in the key, can trivially recover the key and thus decrypt all messages. (In fact, the characters need not even be consecutive, they just need to cover the entire key, or ...

7

There is a technique called "format preserving encryption", which could be called an "arbitrary-size block cipher". This would allow to map your set of 5-character strings onto itself. Of course, this can't really get too secure, as it has still the limitations of ECB mode: encrypting the same string with the same key always gives the same ciphertext. Your ...

6

The real security of Vigenere is difficult to quantify. A million character plaintext with a 10 character password is easy to break. But a 10 character plaintext with a 10 character randomly chosen password is essentially a one-time-pad and theoretically unbreakable. Given the data you've told us (plaintext: 100 to 5000 characters; password: 30 to 100 ...

5

Because CBC-MAC with inputs that are not prefix free is weak against existential forgery, meaning it is not a "secure" MAC. More precisely, CBC-MAC is easily distinguishable from a random function (i.e. not a PRF) when the input domain is not prefix-free. This is because an adversary can request the CBC-MAC of messages $M_0$ and $M_1$, and then xor the MAC ...

5

Yes, this is possible (conditionally). It sounds like you want Format Preserving Encryption. FPE works by encrypting from an arbitrary domain $X$ onto $X$. Consequentially, if plaintext $M \in X$ is encrypted to ciphertext $C \in X$, any decryption of $C$ - even with the wrong key - will yield a decrypted message inside of $X$. Thus an attacker doesn't know ...

4

There is a generic construction, by Granboulan and myself, which shows that it can be done "perfectly": if you have a seekable pseudo-random stream (which you can get with a conventional block cipher in CTR mode), then you can have a pseudo-random permutation over a domain of arbitrary size N, such that evaluating that permutation over a given input uses ...

3

Your problem, the way I read it, could be described as follows: You are currently using password encryption for protecting the confidentiality of files on a known format. You have concerns regarding the long term confidentiality of those files, given that you don't know what computers will be able to do in the future. Ideally, you want the confidentiality to ...

2

There are a couple of related concepts here: Tweakable blockciphers and format-preserving encryption (FPE). It turns out that tweakable blockciphers provide a very natural way of obtaining FPE, but they have other uses as well. As the blog discusses, sometimes we want, say, encrypted credit card numbers to themselves look like credit card numbers. That is, ...

1

Ff1,2,3 are basically inspired by LubyRack off constructions . At the core they differ in their round functions and key scheduling FF1 supports greater range of lengths and a tweak FF2 generates subkey for each iteration to thwart any side channel attacks FF3 has tweaks is split and used in rounding function, also the reverse the sub-strings of given ...

1

First let's very precisely look at a tweakless blockcipher to fully understand it: A regular blockcipher $E_k(x)$ with blocksize $n$ and key size $k$ is a permutation of the input block. What do I mean with that? Let's first tackle the word permutation here. Often a permutation means re-arranging elements within a set. So the set of all permutations of ...

1

This is more a legal question than a cryptographic one. Therefore I would like to note that I can not provide any legal advice and that you should ask a lawyer about the details of your individual case. But, to share my point of view which I base on my personal experience: If a company owns a patent (on an encryption technology, or anything else), they ...

1

Yes, in fact there is at least one length-preserving asymmetric encryption scheme. It's deterministic, though, so there are some security tradeoffs that come with it. It's described in the paper "Deterministic and Efficiently Searchable Encryption" by Boldyreva et al. Look for "RSA-DOAEP".

1

Selective format-compliant JPEG encryption as you are trying to do it is a great idea, but it won't work... not like this. To keep the reasons short and simple: JPEG uses lossy compression (and even lossier recompression). If you really want to create a format-compliant implementation, you'll have to take care that you're independent of any ...

1

Eek! The Vigenere cipher is completely and totally insecure. You should never use it. Instead, use a modern authenticated encryption scheme. If you are protecting data in transit, I recommend using TLS (or SSL). If you are protecting data in storage, I recommend encrypting it with GPG (or PGP). This is the simplest, easiest way to get well-vetted ...

1

For such short messages, you're not gaining much (if anything) from using a CBC, CFB, etc., that require an initialization vector (these modes of operation are to ensure against a block of output being repeated when a block of input is repeated). For your situation (input that's shorter than one block), using ECB shouldn't pose a major problem. For a block ...

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