Cryptography

Cryptography is, traditionally, the study of ways to convert information from its normal, comprehensible form into an obscured guise, unreadable without special knowledge — the practice of encryption. In the past, cryptography helped ensure secrecy in important communications, such as those of spies, military leaders, and diplomats. In recent decades, the field of cryptography has expanded its remit. Examples include schemes like digital signatures and digital cash, digital rights management for intellectual property protection, and securing electronic commerce. Cryptography is now often built into the infrastructure for computing and telecommunications; users may not even be aware of its presence.In cryptology, RSA is an algorithm for public-key cryptography. It was the first algorithm known to be suitable for signing as well as encryption, and one of the first great advances in public key cryptography. RSA is widely used in electronic commerce protocols, and is believed to be secure given sufficiently long keys and the use of up-to-date implementations.Padding schemesWhen used in practice, RSA is generally combined with some padding scheme. The goal of the padding scheme is to prevent an number of attacks that potentially work against RSA without padding:• When encrypting with low encryption exponents (e.g., e = 3) and small values of the m, (i.e. m is less than n1/e) the result of me is strictly less than the modulus n. In this case, ciphertexts can be easily decrypted by taking the eth root of the ciphertext over the integers. • Because RSA encryption is a deterministic encryption algorithm – i.e., has no random component – an attacker can successfully launch a chosen plaintext attack against the cryptosystem, by encrypting likely plaintexts under the public key and test if they are equal to the ciphertext. A cryptosystem is called semantically secure if an attacker cannot distinguish two encryptions from each other even if the attacker knows (or has chosen) the corresponding plaintexts. As described abouve, RSA without padding is not semantically secure. • RSA has the property that the product of to ciphertexts is equal to the encryption of the product of the respective plaintexts. That is Because of this multiplicatvive property a chosen-ciphertext attack is possible. E.g. an attacker, who wants to know the decryption of a ciphertext c=me mod n may ask the holder of the secret key to decrypt an unsuspiciously looking ciphertext cremod n for some value r chosen by the attacker. Because of the multiplicative property this is the encryption of mrmod n. Hence, if the attacker is successful with the attack, he will learn mrmod n from which he can derive the message m by multiplying mr with the modular inverse of r modulo n. To avoid these problems, practical RSA implementations typically embed some form of structured, randomized padding into the value m before encrypting it. This padding ensures that m does not fall into the range of insecure plaintexts, and that a given message, once padded, will encrypt to one of a large number of different possible ciphertexts.Standards such as PKCS have been carefully designed to securely pad messages prior to RSA encryption. Because these schemes pad the plaintext m with some number of additional bits, the size of the un-padded message M must be somewhat smaller. RSA padding schemes must be carefully designed so as to prevent sophisticated attacks which may be facilitated by a predictable message structure. Early versions of the PKCS standard (i.e. PKCS #1 up to version 1.5) used a construction that turned RSA into a semantically secure encryption scheme. This version was later found vulnerable to a practical adaptive chosen ciphertext attack. Later versions of the standard include Optimal Asymmetric Encryption Padding (OAEP), which prevents these attacks. The PKCS standard also incorporates processing schemes designed to provide additional security for RSA signatures, e.g., the Probabilistic Signature Scheme for RSA (RSA-PSS).Signing messagesSuppose Alice uses Bob's public key to send him an encrypted message. In the message, she can claim to be Alice but Bob has no way of verifying that the message was actually from Alice since anyone can use Bob's public key to send him encrypted messages. So, in order to verify the origin of a message, RSA can also be used to sign a message.Suppose Alice wishes to send a signed message to Bob. She produces a hash value of the message, raises it to the power of d mod n (as she does when decrypting a message), and attaches it as a "signature" to the message. When Bob receives the signed message, he raises the signature to the power of e mod n (as he does when encrypting a message), and compares the resulting hash value with the message's actual hash value. If the two agree, he knows that the author of the message was in possession of Alice's secret key, and that the message has not been tampered with since.Note that secure padding schemes such as RSA-PSS are as essential for the security of message signing as they are for message encryption, and that the same key should never be used for both encryption and signing purposes.