# Tag Info

134

End-to-end encryption over a channel with an eavesdropper, like the WhatsApp server, works by using a mathemagical spell called Diffie–Hellman key agreement. What follows is not actually how WhatsApp works,* but explores some of the high-level ideas to concretely answer the question without getting lost in the full gory details of everything about the ...

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Is there's a way to make sure that non-open source programs are really using end-to-end encryption? Only by deep reverse-engineering. Which is hard, and might be illegal. Plus the apps are a moving target: they change like weekly. And, using end-to-end encryption is not proof that no interception is possible: this encryption (or its key generation) could be ...

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ECDSA is a digital signature algorithm ECIES is an Integrated Encryption scheme ECDH is a key secure key exchange algorithm First you should understand the purpose of these algorithms. Digital signature algorithms are used to authenticate a digital content. A valid digital signature gives a recipient reason to believe that the message was created by a ...

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What is usually meant by "group encryption" is not what you are after. Group encryption algorithms strive to achieve the following: a given message is encrypted, and may be decrypted only if sufficiently many group members collaborate. This is not what you seek; what you want is a system such that a given message can be encrypted once and every member of the ...

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TL;DR     The answer is classical cryptography. Besides a quantum link, secure data communication with Quantum Cryptography uses classical links, a lot of mathematically provable classical cryptography, and a setup procedure using initially trusted material just as in classical cryptography. To perform the same other than by the One Time Pad, ...

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Simplified SSLv3/TLS from this book Note, $R_{(Alice|Bob)}$ is a random nonce chosen by Alice or Bob respectively, and $\{S\}_{Bob}$ is encryption with Bob's public key. pre-master secret As stated in one of the answer you link to, "The point of a premaster secret is to provide greater consistency between TLS cipher suites." In the figure above, the ...

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I assume you're talking about SSL/TLS or a similar protocol. In these protocols there are two reasons to use Diffie-Hellman: Your certificate only supports signing Either it is an RSA certificate restricted to signing, or it uses an algorithm that doesn't support encryption, such as DSA or ECDSA. Forward security - What happens if the server's private key ...

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The first part of this partial self-answer uses additional information I received from Professor Simon R. Blackburn, one of the author of the recent attack. The method used to generate parameters is not public, e.g. for the matrix $m\in GL(n,\mathbb F)$ which careful choice was acknowledged critical to defeat an earlier version of the attack. The authors of ...

14

Most likely, this 'shared secret' was actually an IKE "preshared key"; it is used to authenticate the two sides (and, for IKEv1, is stirred into the keys). It actually isn't used as a key (and hence someone learning that key cannot use it to listen in, unless they perform an active Man-in-the-Middle attack). I suspect the password is the authentication ...

14

I recommend avoiding Diffie-Hellman parameter generation. Instead, use a standardized DH group with a sufficiently large modulus (2048-bit or larger). For example, group #14 or #15 from RFC3526 (see sections 3 and 4) would be a good choice. Alternatively, switch to the elliptic curve variant of Diffie-Hellman and use Curve25519. The article you linked to ...

14

There's a few different related parts here, and the nomenclature of the library you've cited is a little confusing. Curve25519 is an elliptic curve over the finite field $\mathbb F_p$, where $p = 2^{255} - 19$, whence came the 25519 part of the name. Specifically, it is the Montgomery curve $y^2 = x^3 + 486662 x^2 + x$, but you don't need to know the ...

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Yes, there are a few reasons to prefer ECDH over RSA: ECDH will perform much better; ECDH can provide forward security when used with ephemeral key pairs without a large performance overhead for creating those key pairs; ECDH should be impervious to most oracle attacks, i.e. timing based padding oracle attacks on OAEP. For the forward secrecy you require ...

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If by "using them on a second device such as a PC running Windows" you mean that you open Whatsapp web there, then no you cannot decrypt your messages there. Whatsapp web is a client that connects to your phone (usually using whatsapp servers as proxy). The client has shared keys with the phone (you scanned them as QR code) and the phone uses this to ...

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Fair exchange protocols aren't new by any means, but there is a lack of layman-friendly material out there, unfortunately. I think the high prevalence of theoretical cryptography in fair exchange protocols may be partially responsible for that. At any rate, here is the basic idea behind a fair exchange protocol. Suppose you have two parties, Alice and Bob, ...

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There is nothing related to passwords in AES. AES uses 128-bit keys, i.e. sequences of 128 bits. How you come up with such a key is out of scope of AES. In some contexts, you want to generate these 128 bits in a deterministic way from a password (and possibly some publicly known contextual data, like a "salt"); this is a job for password hashing. In other ...

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Here's the obvious advice (other than "don't roll your own protocol/solution; reuse one that has already been vetted"): Make sure that you use a secure curve. Obvious alternatives are P256 (with possible P224 or P192 if you need better performance, and don't mind cutting into the security somewhat), or (if you don't trust the US Government) a NUMS curve or ...

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They're actually sampling $5n$ elements from $\Psi_{16}$. Perhaps Protocol 2 on page 5 shows this most clearly, where $\textbf{s}, \textbf{e} \stackrel{\$}{\leftarrow} \Psi_{16}^n$and$\textbf{s}', \textbf{e}', \textbf{e}'' \stackrel{\$}{\leftarrow} \Psi_{16}^n$ are sampled (on line 3 on Alice' side, and line 1 on Bob's). This probably also answers part of ...

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Handing keys, in general, is known as key management. Symmetric keys should be kept secret from other parties than the participants in the scheme. The term "secret key" is often used as a synonym for the symmetric key. The private keys for asymmetric schemes are not shared, but are of course also kept secret, as privacy implies secrecy. The establishment ...

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Using lattices/ring-LWE, there is Lattice Cryptography for the Internet (by me), which inherits from Ring-LWE encryption, and has been implemented by Bos et al. with further improvements by Alkim et al. The underlying mechanism is conceptually DH-like, but uses completely different mathematics. We start with a uniformly random $a \in R_q = R/qR$, which can ...

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An attack would be trivial if the seed of the RNG was only 32 bits; just enumerate the seeds, and test which matches the intercepted messages. That's easy. However the default Java Random class uses a 48-bit state and seed (which would still be attackable, though $2^{16}$ times less easily), and there are safe subclasses, thus use of Random does not imply ...

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That's a bit of a strange question. ECDH is a key agreement protool. ECC does not have a direct form of encryption as RSA has. ECIES is basically ECDH used to derive a symmetric key, which is then used to encrypt the plaintext. You can see it as a delayed form of key agreement. So your question is if ECIES can be used to encrypt session keys. That would ...

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Alice also needs to first decrypt the symmetric key and then decrypt the message. It almost seems like a double work. Encrypting a short plaintext (i.e. the symmetric key) requires only one asymmetric (e.g. RSA) operation, while encrypting a longer message would in theory require many RSA operations. Suppose we want to encrypt a 1 MiB message. Using 2048-...

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You're describing a form of three-pass protocol, which is a communication mechanism where neither party needs to know each other's secret key. Wikipedia describes a helpful metaphor using a box that can be locked by two padlocks: First, Alice puts the secret message in a box, and locks the box using a padlock to which only she has a key. She then sends the ...

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The first protocol for password authenticated key exchange that appeared in the crypto community was the Bellovin-Merritt scheme (see also this survey page 4). This protocol is very simple, and might actually suit your need: is is exactly a Diffie-Hellman key exchange, in which the flows are encrypted with a block cipher (using the common password as the key ...

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@fgrieu already wrote a little book, so I'll restrict my answer to a minimum to avoid repetitions. Think of this as an extended comment (which indeed wouldn't have fit the comment size limits). What makes Quantum Cryptography secure? … what makes it more secure than the classical version? In classical crypto, things like three party key distribution ...

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The premise of boxes is that Alice and Bob know each other and write to each other. Alice can use a box to send a message to Bob. On receipt of the box, Bob knows (a) it came from Alice, and (b) nobody else could have read or tampered with it. The premise of sealed boxes is that Bob has an anonymous dropbox. Alice can use a sealed box to send a message ...

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How does one verify a key revocation? As Jon Callas already stated: you simply don’t. In case a different wording helps, here’s a quote related to the exact same question… https://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gnupg-users/2014-February/049100.html … I revoked my key and on the public key server it says: "* KEY REVOKED * [not verified]" Why does ...

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No, the user of the key does. A revocation issued by the key itself, or by a designated revoker, which is some different key. If I am going to encrypt to you, I look at the key before I do, and I look to see if your key is revoked. Similarly, if I am verifying a signature your key made, I look to see if the key is revoked.

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CRAM-MD5 is a protocol to demonstrate knowledge of a password. In the context of email, it is sometime used by an email client to authenticate to a POP, IMAP, or/and SMTP server. Basically, the password is used as the key of HMAC-MD5 in a challenge-response protocol. Among positive things there are to say about CRAM-MD5: The password is not exchanged in ...

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ElGamal appears to be used instead of Diffie-Hellman (or IES) in OpenPGP mostly because when that format was put together, there were some unresolved intellectual property issues surrounding both RSA and Diffie-Hellman, while ElGamal was unproblematic. This trend for ElGamal seems to stick around, mostly by force of habit, e.g. when switching to elliptic-...

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