Multiple encryption

Last updated October 05, 2024

Multiple encryption is the process of encrypting an already encrypted message one or more times, either using the same or a different algorithm. It is also known as cascade encryption, cascade ciphering, multiple encryption, and superencipherment. Superencryption refers to the outer-level encryption of a multiple encryption.

Independent keys

Picking any two ciphers, if the key used is the same for both, the second cipher could possibly undo the first cipher, partly or entirely. This is true of ciphers where the decryption process is exactly the same as the encryption process (a reciprocal cipher) —the second cipher would completely undo the first. If an attacker were to recover the key through cryptanalysis of the first encryption layer, the attacker could possibly decrypt all the remaining layers, assuming the same key is used for all layers.

To prevent that risk, one can use keys that are statistically independent for each layer (e.g. independent RNGs).

Ideally each key should have separate and different generation, sharing, and management processes.

Independent Initialization Vectors

For en/decryption processes that require sharing an Initialization Vector (IV) / nonce these are typically, openly shared or made known to the recipient (and everyone else). Its good security policy never to provide the same data in both plaintext and ciphertext when using the same key and IV. Therefore, its recommended (although at this moment without specific evidence) to use separate IVs for each layer of encryption.

Importance of the first layer

With the exception of the one-time pad, no cipher has been theoretically proven to be unbreakable. Furthermore, some recurring properties may be found in the ciphertexts generated by the first cipher. Since those ciphertexts are the plaintexts used by the second cipher, the second cipher may be rendered vulnerable to attacks based on known plaintext properties (see references below).

This is the case when the first layer is a program P that always adds the same string S of characters at the beginning (or end) of all ciphertexts (commonly known as a magic number). When found in a file, the string S allows an operating system to know that the program P has to be launched in order to decrypt the file. This string should be removed before adding a second layer.

To prevent this kind of attack, one can use the method provided by Bruce Schneier:^[1]

Generate a random pad R of the same size as the plaintext.
Encrypt R using the first cipher and key.
XOR the plaintext with the pad, then encrypt the result using the second cipher and a different (!) key.
Concatenate both ciphertexts in order to build the final ciphertext.

A cryptanalyst must break both ciphers to get any information. This will, however, have the drawback of making the ciphertext twice as long as the original plaintext.

Note, however, that a weak first cipher may merely make a second cipher that is vulnerable to a chosen plaintext attack also vulnerable to a known plaintext attack. However, a block cipher must not be vulnerable to a chosen plaintext attack to be considered secure. Therefore, the second cipher described above is not secure under that definition, either. Consequently, both ciphers still need to be broken. The attack illustrates why strong assumptions are made about secure block ciphers and ciphers that are even partially broken should never be used.

The Rule of Two

The Rule of Two is a data security principle from the NSA's Commercial Solutions for Classified Program (CSfC).^[2] It specifies two completely independent layers of cryptography to protect data. For example, data could be protected by both hardware encryption at its lowest level and software encryption at the application layer. It could mean using two FIPS-validated software cryptomodules from different vendors to en/decrypt data.

The importance of vendor and/or model diversity between the layers of components centers around removing the possibility that the manufacturers or models will share a vulnerability. This way if one components is compromised there is still an entire layer of encryption protecting the information at rest or in transit. The CSfC Program offers solutions to achieve diversity in two ways. "The first is to implement each layer using components produced by different manufacturers. The second is to use components from the same manufacturer, where that manufacturer has provided NSA with sufficient evidence that the implementations of the two components are independent of one another."^[3]

The principle is practiced in the NSA's secure mobile phone called Fishbowl.^[4] The phones use two layers of encryption protocols, IPsec and Secure Real-time Transport Protocol (SRTP), to protect voice communications. The Samsung Galaxy S9 Tactical Edition is also an approved CSfC Component.

Examples

The figure shows from inside to outside the process of how the encrypted capsule is formed in the context of Echo Protocol, used by the Software Application GoldBug Messenger.^[5] GoldBug has implemented a hybrid system for authenticity and confidentiality.^[4]

First layer of the encryption: The ciphertext of the original readable message is hashed, and subsequently the symmetric keys are encrypted via the asymmetric key - e.g. deploying the algorithm RSA. In an intermediate step the ciphertext, and the hash digest of the ciphertext are combined into a capsule, and packed together. It follows the approach: Encrypt-then-MAC. In order for the receiver to verify that the ciphertext has not been tampered with, the digest is computed before the ciphertext is decrypted.

Second layer of encryption: Optionally it is still possible, therefore to encrypt the capsule of the first layer in addition with an AES-256, - comparable to a commonly shared, 32-character long symmetric password. Hybrid Encryption is then added to multiple encryption.^{[ citation needed ]}

Third layer of the encryption: Then, this capsule is transmitted via a secure SSL/TLS connection to the communication partner

Related Research Articles

Blowfish is a symmetric-key block cipher, designed in 1993 by Bruce Schneier and included in many cipher suites and encryption products. Blowfish provides a good encryption rate in software, and no effective cryptanalysis of it has been found to date for smaller files. It is recommended Blowfish should not be used to encrypt files larger than 4GB in size, Twofish should be used instead.

In cryptography, a block cipher is a deterministic algorithm that operates on fixed-length groups of bits, called blocks. Block ciphers are the elementary building blocks of many cryptographic protocols. They are ubiquitous in the storage and exchange of data, where such data is secured and authenticated via encryption.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cryptanalysis</span> Study of analyzing information systems in order to discover their hidden aspects

Cryptanalysis refers to the process of analyzing information systems in order to understand hidden aspects of the systems. Cryptanalysis is used to breach cryptographic security systems and gain access to the contents of encrypted messages, even if the cryptographic key is unknown.

In cryptography, encryption is the process of transforming information in a way that, ideally, only authorized parties can decode. This process converts the original representation of the information, known as plaintext, into an alternative form known as ciphertext. Despite its goal, encryption does not itself prevent interference but denies the intelligible content to a would-be interceptor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Triple DES</span> Block cipher

In cryptography, Triple DES, officially the Triple Data Encryption Algorithm, is a symmetric-key block cipher, which applies the DES cipher algorithm three times to each data block. The 56-bit key of the Data Encryption Standard (DES) is no longer considered adequate in the face of modern cryptanalytic techniques and supercomputing power; Triple DES increases the effective security to 112 bits. A CVE released in 2016, CVE-2016-2183, disclosed a major security vulnerability in the DES and 3DES encryption algorithms. This CVE, combined with the inadequate key size of 3DES, led to NIST deprecating 3DES in 2019 and disallowing all uses by the end of 2023. It has been replaced with the more secure, more robust AES.

Symmetric-key algorithms are algorithms for cryptography that use the same cryptographic keys for both the encryption of plaintext and the decryption of ciphertext. The keys may be identical, or there may be a simple transformation to go between the two keys. The keys, in practice, represent a shared secret between two or more parties that can be used to maintain a private information link. The requirement that both parties have access to the secret key is one of the main drawbacks of symmetric-key encryption, in comparison to public-key encryption. However, symmetric-key encryption algorithms are usually better for bulk encryption. With exception of the one-time pad they have a smaller key size, which means less storage space and faster transmission. Due to this, asymmetric-key encryption is often used to exchange the secret key for symmetric-key encryption.

A chosen-plaintext attack (CPA) is an attack model for cryptanalysis which presumes that the attacker can obtain the ciphertexts for arbitrary plaintexts. The goal of the attack is to gain information that reduces the security of the encryption scheme.

A chosen-ciphertext attack (CCA) is an attack model for cryptanalysis where the cryptanalyst can gather information by obtaining the decryptions of chosen ciphertexts. From these pieces of information the adversary can attempt to recover the secret key used for decryption.

In cryptography, an initialization vector (IV) or starting variable is an input to a cryptographic primitive being used to provide the initial state. The IV is typically required to be random or pseudorandom, but sometimes an IV only needs to be unpredictable or unique. Randomization is crucial for some encryption schemes to achieve semantic security, a property whereby repeated usage of the scheme under the same key does not allow an attacker to infer relationships between segments of the encrypted message. For block ciphers, the use of an IV is described by the modes of operation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Block cipher mode of operation</span> Cryptography algorithm

In cryptography, a block cipher mode of operation is an algorithm that uses a block cipher to provide information security such as confidentiality or authenticity. A block cipher by itself is only suitable for the secure cryptographic transformation of one fixed-length group of bits called a block. A mode of operation describes how to repeatedly apply a cipher's single-block operation to securely transform amounts of data larger than a block.

In cryptography, ciphertext or cyphertext is the result of encryption performed on plaintext using an algorithm, called a cipher. Ciphertext is also known as encrypted or encoded information because it contains a form of the original plaintext that is unreadable by a human or computer without the proper cipher to decrypt it. This process prevents the loss of sensitive information via hacking. Decryption, the inverse of encryption, is the process of turning ciphertext into readable plaintext. Ciphertext is not to be confused with codetext because the latter is a result of a code, not a cipher.

Articles related to cryptography include:

In cryptography, a ciphertext-only attack (COA) or known ciphertext attack is an attack model for cryptanalysis where the attacker is assumed to have access only to a set of ciphertexts. While the attacker has no channel providing access to the plaintext prior to encryption, in all practical ciphertext-only attacks, the attacker still has some knowledge of the plaintext. For instance, the attacker might know the language in which the plaintext is written or the expected statistical distribution of characters in the plaintext. Standard protocol data and messages are commonly part of the plaintext in many deployed systems, and can usually be guessed or known efficiently as part of a ciphertext-only attack on these systems.

In cryptography, the Cellular Message Encryption Algorithm (CMEA) is a block cipher which was used for securing mobile phones in the United States. CMEA is one of four cryptographic primitives specified in a Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) standard, and is designed to encrypt the control channel, rather than the voice data. In 1997, a group of cryptographers published attacks on the cipher showing it had several weaknesses which give it a trivial effective strength of a 24-bit to 32-bit cipher. Some accusations were made that the NSA had pressured the original designers into crippling CMEA, but the NSA has denied any role in the design or selection of the algorithm. The ECMEA and SCEMA ciphers are derived from CMEA.

The Cramer–Shoup system is an asymmetric key encryption algorithm, and was the first efficient scheme proven to be secure against adaptive chosen ciphertext attack using standard cryptographic assumptions. Its security is based on the computational intractability of the Decisional Diffie–Hellman assumption. Developed by Ronald Cramer and Victor Shoup in 1998, it is an extension of the ElGamal cryptosystem. In contrast to ElGamal, which is extremely malleable, Cramer–Shoup adds other elements to ensure non-malleability even against a resourceful attacker. This non-malleability is achieved through the use of a universal one-way hash function and additional computations, resulting in a ciphertext which is twice as large as in ElGamal.

Encryption software is software that uses cryptography to prevent unauthorized access to digital information. Cryptography is used to protect digital information on computers as well as the digital information that is sent to other computers over the Internet.

In cryptanalysis, attack models or attack types are a classification of cryptographic attacks specifying the kind of access a cryptanalyst has to a system under attack when attempting to "break" an encrypted message generated by the system. The greater the access the cryptanalyst has to the system, the more useful information they can get to utilize for breaking the cypher.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cryptography</span> Practice and study of secure communication techniques

Cryptography, or cryptology, is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adversarial behavior. More generally, cryptography is about constructing and analyzing protocols that prevent third parties or the public from reading private messages. Modern cryptography exists at the intersection of the disciplines of mathematics, computer science, information security, electrical engineering, digital signal processing, physics, and others. Core concepts related to information security are also central to cryptography. Practical applications of cryptography include electronic commerce, chip-based payment cards, digital currencies, computer passwords, and military communications.

There are various implementations of the Advanced Encryption Standard, also known as Rijndael.

References

↑ Schneier, Bruce (30 March 2015). Applied Cryptography, Second Edition: Protocols, Algorithms, and Source Code in C. Wiley Computer Publishing. p. 368. ISBN 9781119096726.
↑ "Commercial Solutions for Classified Program". US National Security Agency. Archived from the original on 25 December 2015. Retrieved 24 December 2015.
↑ "Mobile Access Capability Package". US National Security Agency. Retrieved 28 February 2020.
1 2 Adams, David / Maier, Ann-Kathrin (2016): BIG SEVEN Study, open source crypto-messengers to be compared - or: Comprehensive Confidentiality Review & Audit of GoldBug, Encrypting E-Mail-Client & Secure Instant Messenger, Descriptions, tests and analysis reviews of 20 functions of the application GoldBug based on the essential fields and methods of evaluation of the 8 major international audit manuals for IT security investigations including 38 figures and 87 tables., URL: https://sf.net/projects/goldbug/files/bigseven-crypto-audit.pdf - English / German Language, Version 1.1, 305 pages, June 2016 (ISBN: DNB 110368003X - 2016B14779)
↑ "GoldBug - Secure E-Mail-Client & Instant Messenger".