Table of Contents
Symmetrical ciphers
Modern ciphers
Block ciphers
- DES
- Key size: 7 bytes. Block size: 8 bytes
- 3DES
- Key size: 7, 14 or 21 bytes. Block size: 8 bytes
- AES
- Key size: 16, 24 or 32 bytes. Block size: 16 bytes
- IDEA
- Key size: 16 bytes. Block size: 8 bytes
Stream ciphers
- RC4
- E_RC4(key, plaintext) = ciphertext; E_RC4(key,ciphertext) = plaintext
Block ciphers in general
- ECB mode (Electronic Code Book)
- Each block is encrypted separately: C_1 = E( k, P_1); C_2 = E(k, P_2), etc.
- ECB can be brute forced if some plain text blocks are known
- Large images encrypted with ECB can be “visually decrypted”
- CBC mode (Cipher block chaining)
- Uses an Initialisation Vector (IV) block viewed as C_0 (note that the IV is in general not seen by the attacker)
- Each block is sequentially xored with the previous block C_1=E(k, P_1 XOR IV); C_2 = E(k, P_2 XOR C1); etc.
- As ECB, a plaintext block must be known for brute forcing. However do not use the first block as the IV is unknown.
- CTR mode
- Uses an IV that is incremented for each block: C_1 = E(k, P_1 XOR IV); C_2 = E(k, P_2 XOR (IV+1))
- Possible attacks
- if IV is initialised with all zero bytes
- if the counter is reset or not incremented (for example in an encrypted conversation between two parties)
- if there are more blocks than 2^(block size in bits) (usually unfeasible)
- OFB mode
- Padding
- ECB and CBC require padding of the last block
- There are two main types of padding: null bytes (disadvantage: length of original message becomes ambiguous if it wasn't text) and length padding (PKCS7) which is more common.
- Padding oracle attacks
- These use the fact that after block decryption, if the last byte is N then the last N bytes must be equal to N. Using the encryption and decryption properties of the cipher a brute force attack can be launched to incrementally determine the last byte of the plaintext, the next-to-last byte, etc. More information at http://www.skullsecurity.org/blog/2013/padding-oracle-attacks-in-depth.
- There are tools such as | Pypadbuster that automatically use this algorithm if given a function that returns True on correct padding and False on incorrect padding (the oracle)