## Attacks on Cryptographic Systems (Part I)

• Soft Attacks
No matter how sophisticated the attack techniques become, one must not forget that when the ultimate goal is to obtain the secret message, coercion or social engineering are often the most effective attack techniques. These attacks are based on using physical or psychological threats, robbery, bribery, embezzlement, etc. The attacks are mostly directed to human links of the data security chain.
Social Networks have become a launching pad for these kind of attacks. In a typical soft attack such as the so-called spear-phishing, e-mail addresses and information about the victims social circle is harvested from social networks and then used to send targeted e-mail with malware that cause to reveal secret information for access to secured systems.
• Brute Force Attacks
Assuming, as Kerchoff’s principle recommends, that the algorithm used for encryption and the general context of the message are known to the cryptanalyst, the brute-force attack involves the determination of the specific key being used to encrypt a particular text. When successful, the attacker will also be able to decipher all future messages until the keys are changed. One way to determine the key entails exhaustive search of the key-space (defined as the set of all possible valid keys for the particular crypto-system).
Brute force is a passive, off-line attack in which the attacker Eve passively eavesdrops the communication channel and records cipher text exchanges for further analysis, without interacting with either Alice or Bob.
To estimate the time that a successful brute-force attack will take we need to know the size of the key-space and the speed at which each key can be tested. If $N_k$ is the number of valid keys and we can test $N_s$ keys per second, it will take, on average $\frac{1}{2}(\frac{N_k}{N_s})$ seconds to find the proper key by brute-force.
The threat that a brute-force attack poses cannot be underestimated in the real world. Most financial institutions use cipher-systems based on DES. Keys of length 56-bits, such as the one used by the
standard implementation of DES, can be obtained by brute-force using computer hardware and software available since the late 1990’s. Indeed, to counter this possibility, most contemporary implementations of DES use a derivative known as Triple-DES (or 3-DES) which uses three different 56-bit keys instead of one. The effective key length for the combined 3-DES key is a more secure 168 bits.
Brute force analysis have been used in combination with other attacks as was the case for the deciphering of the Enigma. The famous bombes were an example of the brute-force approach working in combination with a mathematical method that provided an important reduction of the key-space.

To be continued…..

## from Backdoor to Backdoor

While the FBI was accused to set a backdoor to OpenBSD, the NSA clears the record on DES.
There are many stories about sneaking sophisticated chunks of code that make perfectly good encryption system to leak information. Something like this is extremely difficult to do without nobody noticing it and I think that it must be considered as a lot of unnecessary trouble for the guys that rather will nicely ask for the keys to your front door.

## The book gets excellent review at Amazon.com

A very nice surprise from the comment pages at Amazon.com, a 5 star rating for the Cryptography book authored by A. Bruen and myself.

The reviewer consider the book a Insightful Interdisciplinary Orientation on the subject, and gave this book the highest rating among similar books.

Thanks.

Bonus:

We are in good company too!

## More reviews for the AMS

I have a few new reviews of papers on cryptography in my updated page. For those interested in the security of NMAC and HMAC or affiliation hiding key exchanges, I recommend reading the reviews. They include links to relevant papers.

## Alan Turing

He deserved much better

National Post
14 Sep 2009

In the very distant future, the name of Alan Turing (1912-1954) will be among the very few for which the 20th century is remembered, long after most of the politicians, artists and celebrities have receded into confusion and oblivion. His stature is…read more…

## A 200 year old cipher recently broken

This Excellent article in the WSJ described the recently broken Patterson’s Cipher. Dr. Smithline from the the Center for Communications Research in Princeton, N.J., got the cipher from a neighbour working on a school project about Thomas Jefferson. Make sure to check the interactive tab on the article for a very well done graphical description of the cipher.

h/t Paul

## ENIGMA encryption cracker Heroes

ENIGMA crackers reunite at Bletchley Park

I had the honour to meet one of them, now an emeritus math professor.

Check this article for pictures of the Turing Bombe the electronic-mechanical code-breaking machine used by the British to crack 3,000 Enigma messages a day during the Second World War.

Cryptool ver 1.4 has a very well done simulator of the ENIGMA machine encryption.

I recently discussed the problems associated with weak passwords here. Since then, there have been a few cases of hackers publishing stolen passwords form popular sites such as phpbb or the passwords that the conficker worm uses to spread across shares. Some researches report that people often use the same password on many websites making themselves vulnerable to serious attack if the password for a low value website is the same as the one used in a high value target

Password selection tips abound and as long as your password has enough entropy, users data is somewhat out of reach of most hackers.

Despite the advice of security gurus, the manifest limitations of the average human brain for generating and remembering more than a few passwords is a physical barrier to a widespread adoption secure practices. Password managers may help to keep your passwords organized. They have functions to generate strong passwords and can connect directly with browsers or e-mail programs.

Another way around is the OpenID network that allow users to have one identity for multiple on-line services. The OpenID protocol is inclusive enough that can work as an Authenticator using biometrics or smart-tokens.  Open ID is still in the adoption phase, not all online services accept it.

## Collisions, a secure hash function killer (MD5, SHA1, SHA2)

The trouble with the use of MD5 in digital signatures recently uncovered by Sotirov et al. is common to other hash functions.

NIST has been discouraging people to use MD5 and even SHA 1 since many years ago. A good account of this was posted by Dustin Trammell here.

Because the output of a hash function is of a fixed length, usually smaller that the input, there will necessarily be collisions. The collision-free property for hash is thus defined by:

A function $H$ that maps an arbitrary length message $M$ to a fixed length message digest $MD$ is a collision-free hash function if:

1. It is a one-way hash function.

2. It is hard to find two distinct messages $(M', M)$ that hash to the same result $H(M')=H(M)$.

Cryptographers talk about “relatively collision free” hash functions. A good hash function should be designed with the Avalanche Criterion in mind.

The Avalanche Criterion (AC) is used in the analysis of S-boxes or substitution boxes. S-boxes take a string as input and produce an encoded string as output.

The avalanche criterion requires that if any one bit of the input to an S-box is changed, about half of the bits that are output by the S-box should change their values. Therefore, even if collisions are unavoidable, there is no way to generate two strings with the same hash value other than brute force.

## The end of the road for MD5 signed SSL Certificates

X.509 certificates signed by Certificate Authorities that use MD5 function are certainly going to disappear form the Internet as flaws on the MD5 were successfully exploited to generate a rogue certificate that would be considered as valid by all browsers.

The proof of concept was recently published by A. Sotirov et al. , although the basis for the hack has been know for a few years know. The researchers exploited collisions (two different strings that hash to the same value) in the MD5 and the fact that CAs use a sequential numbering of certificates upon issuance.

News that SSL is broken are exaggerated as many CA are already using SHA-1 (a stronger hash function) and the ones that were using MD5 are switching quickly after publication of the flaw.