5.Types Of Cryptographic Algorithms

Types Of Cryptographic Algorithms

There are several ways of classifying cryptographic algorithms. For purposes of this paper, they will be categorized based on the number of keys that are employed for encryption and decryption, and further defined by their application and use. The three types of algorithms that will be discussed are (Figure 1):
  • Secret Key Cryptography (SKC): Uses a single key for both encryption and decryption
  • Public Key Cryptography (PKC): Uses one key for encryption and another for decryption
  • Hash Functions: Uses a mathematical transformation to irreversibly "encrypt" information

Public Key Cryptography (PKC):

Public-key cryptography has been said to be the most significant new development in cryptography in the last 300-400 years. Modern PKC was first described publicly by Stanford University professor Martin Hellman and graduate student Whitfield Diffie in 1976. Their paper described a two-key crypto system in which two parties could engage in a secure communication over a non-secure communications channel without having to share a secret key.

PKC depends upon the existence of so-called one-way functions, or mathematical functions that are easy to computer whereas their inverse function is relatively difficult to compute. Let me give you two simple examples:
  • Multiplication vs. factorization: Suppose I tell you that I have two numbers, 9 and 16, and that I want to calculate the product; it should take almost no time to calculate the product, 144. Suppose instead that I tell you that I have a number, 144, and I need you tell me which pair of integers I multiplied together to obtain that number. You will eventually come up with the solution but whereas calculating the product took milliseconds, factoring will take longer because you first need to find the 8 pair of integer factors and then determine which one is the correct pair.
  • Exponentiation vs. logarithms: Suppose I tell you that I want to take the number 3 to the 6th power; again, it is easy to calculate 36=729. But if I tell you that I have the number 729 and want you to tell me the two integers that I used, x and y so that logx 729 = y, it will take you longer to find all possible solutions and select the pair that I used.
While the examples above are trivial, they do represent two of the functional pairs that are used with PKC; namely, the ease of multiplication and exponentiation versus the relative difficulty of factoring and calculating logarithms, respectively. The mathematical "trick" in PKC is to find atrap door in the one-way function so that the inverse calculation becomes easy given knowledge of some item of information.

Generic PKC employs two keys that are mathematically related although knowledge of one key does not allow someone to easily determine the other key. One key is used to encrypt the plaintext and the other key is used to decrypt the ciphertext. The important point here is that it does not matter which key is applied first, but that both keys are required for the process to work (Figure 1B). Because a pair of keys are required, this approach is also called asymmetric cryptography.

Secret Key Cryptography

    With secret key cryptography, a single key is used for both encryption and decryption. As shown in Figure 1A, the sender uses the key (or some set of rules) to encrypt the plaintext and sends the ciphertext to the receiver. The receiver applies the same key (or ruleset) to decrypt the message and recover the plaintext. Because a single key is used for both functions, secret key cryptography is also called symmetric encryption.

With this form of cryptography, it is obvious that the key must be known to both the sender and the receiver; that, in fact, is the secret. The biggest difficulty with this approach, of course, is the distribution of the key.

Secret key cryptography schemes are generally categorized as being either stream ciphers or block ciphers. Stream ciphers operate on a single bit (byte or computer word) at a time and implement some form of feedback mechanism so that the key is constantly changing. A block cipher is so-called because the scheme encrypts one block of data at a time using the same key on each block. In general, the same plaintext block will always encrypt to the same ciphertext when using the same key in a block cipher whereas the same plaintext will encrypt to different ciphertext in a stream cipher.

Stream ciphers come in several flavors but two are worth mentioning here. Self-synchronizing stream ciphers calculate each bit in the keystream as a function of the previous n bits in the keystream. It is termed "self-synchronizing" because the decryption process can stay synchronized with the encryption process merely by knowing how far into the n-bit keystream it is. One problem is error propagation; a garbled bit in transmission will result in n garbled bits at the receiving side. Synchronous stream ciphers generate the keystream in a fashion independent of the message stream but by using the same keystream generation function at sender and receiver. While stream ciphers do not propagate transmission errors, they are, by their nature, periodic so that the keystream will eventually repeat.
  • Block ciphers can operate in one of several modes; the following four are the most important:
  • Electronic Codebook (ECB) mode is the simplest, most obvious application: the secret key is used to encrypt the plaintext block to form a ciphertext block. Two identical plaintext blocks, then, will always generate the same ciphertext block. Although this is the most common mode of block ciphers, it is susceptible to a variety of brute-force attacks.
  • Cipher Block Chaining (CBC) mode adds a feedback mechanism to the encryption scheme. In CBC, the plaintext is exclusively-ORed (XORed) with the previous ciphertext block prior to encryption. In this mode, two identical blocks of plaintext never encrypt to the same ciphertext.
  • Cipher Feedback (CFB) mode is a block cipher implementation as a self-synchronizing stream cipher. CFB mode allows data to be encrypted in units smaller than the block size, which might be useful in some applications such as encrypting interactive terminal input. If we were using 1-byte CFB mode, for example, each incoming character is placed into a shift register the same size as the block, encrypted, and the block transmitted. At the receiving side, the ciphertext is decrypted and the extra bits in the block (i.e., everything above and beyond the one byte) are discarded.
  • Output Feedback (OFB) mode is a block cipher implementation conceptually similar to a synchronous stream cipher. OFB prevents the same plaintext block from generating the same ciphertext block by using an internal feedback mechanism that is independent of both the plaintext and ciphertext bitstreams.

A nice overview of these different modes can be found at progressive-coding.com.
Secret key cryptography algorithms that are in use today include:

Data Encryption Standard (DES):

The most common SKC scheme used today, DES was designed by IBM in the 1970s and adopted by the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) [now the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST)] in 1977 for commercial and unclassified government applications. DES is a block-cipher employing a 56-bit key that operates on 64-bit blocks. DES has a complex set of rules and transformations that were designed specifically to yield fast hardware implementations and slow software implementations, although this latter point is becoming less significant today since the speed of computer processors is several orders of magnitude faster today than twenty years ago. IBM also proposed a 112-bit key for DES, which was rejected at the time by the government; the use of 112-bit keys was considered in the 1990s, however, conversion was never seriously considered.

Symmetric-key cryptography

Symmetric-key cryptography refers to encryption methods in which both the sender and receiver share the same key (or, less commonly, in which their keys are different, but related in an easily computable way). This was the only kind of encryption publicly known until June 1976.
One round (out of 8.5) of thepatented IDEA cipher, used in some versions of PGP for high-speed encryption of, for instance, e-mail
  • The modern study of symmetric-key ciphers relates mainly to the study of block ciphers and stream ciphers and to their applications. A block cipher is, in a sense, a modern embodiment of Alberti's polyalphabetic cipher: block ciphers take as input a block of plaintext and a key, and output a block of ciphertext of the same size. Since messages are almost always longer than a single block, some method of knitting together successive blocks is required. Several have been developed, some with better security in one aspect or another than others. They are the mode of operations and must be carefully considered when using a block cipher in a cryptosystem.
  • The Data Encryption Standard (DES) and the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) are block cipher designs which have been designated cryptography standards by the US government (though DES's designation was finally withdrawn after the AES was adopted). Despite its deprecation as an official standard, DES (especially its still-approved and much more secure triple-DES variant) remains quite popular; it is used across a wide range of applications, from ATM encryption to e-mail privacyand secure remote access. Many other block ciphers have been designed and released, with considerable variation in quality. Many have been thoroughly broken. See Category:Block ciphers.
  • Stream ciphers, in contrast to the 'block' type, create an arbitrarily long stream of key material, which is combined with the plaintext bit-by-bit or character-by-character, somewhat like the one-time pad. In a stream cipher, the output stream is created based on an internal state which changes as the cipher operates. That state change is controlled by the key, and, in some stream ciphers, by the plaintext stream as well. RC4 is an example of a well-known, and widely used, stream cipher; see Category:Stream ciphers.
  • Cryptographic hash functions (often called message digest functions) do not necessarily use keys, but are a related and important class of cryptographic algorithms. They take input data (often an entire message), and output a short, fixed length hash, and do so as a one-way function. For good ones, collisions (two plaintexts which produce the same hash) are extremely difficult to find.
  • Message authentication codes (MACs) are much like cryptographic hash functions, except that a secret key is used to authenticate the hash value on receipt. These block an attack against plain hash functions.