Original post written by Aïda Diop for Auth0 blog.
Learn why you need a secure, personalized, and modern cryptographic system.
We use cryptography daily without realizing it to protect our digital life. When unlocking our smartphones, making purchases online, or simply surfing the web, cryptography is the underlying technology protecting our private data, our identities, and our digital footprint. Cryptography is an integral part of the security process used to protect information in computing systems.
The security principles cryptosystems must ensure are data confidentiality, data authenticity, data integrity, and user authentication. Cryptography is often characterized as the strongest part of the security process. In theory, cryptography indeed provides strong security guarantees based on mathematical security models and proofs. Cryptographic implementations in practice are, however, brittle and, as such, are particularly prone to introduce vulnerabilities when they are performed by non-experts. The knowledge of basic building blocks and principles, as well as their secure implementation as specified in standards and specifications, is therefore essential. In this post, we give a bird's-eye view of modern cryptography, its building blocks, and principles in order to paint a picture of the areas in which developers can develop a breadth of knowledge in order to implement secure cryptographic protocols.
Modern Cryptography
Encryption is the main application of cryptography. It consists in producing an unintelligible blob of data from actual data in order to ensure its confidentiality. As a process, it can be described as a set of encryption/decryption algorithms, with at least two parties who are trying to exchange some information over an insecure network. The encryption algorithm is referred to as the cipher, the unencrypted message is referred to as the plaintext, and the encrypted blob resulting from applying the cipher on the plaintext is the ciphertext. The encryption process uses the cipher along with a secret key to derive the ciphertext. Without knowing the key, no one — and certainly no attacker — should be able to decrypt the ciphertext to recover the initial plaintext. Cryptographic secrecy goes even further, requiring that not one bit of information should be uncovered about the plaintext from the ciphertext without knowing the key. This is known as Kerckhoffs's principle, which states that the security of an encryption algorithm resides in the secrecy of the encryption key. The entire encryption algorithm can therefore be public, and the security guarantees still hold as long as the secrecy of the encryption key is maintained.
In that context, two paradigms are used in cryptography to handle the secure deployment, use, and protection of cryptographic keys, namely secret key cryptography and public key cryptography.
Secret Key Cryptography
Symmetric encryption
Symmetric encryption, also known as secret key encryption, consists of using the same cryptographic key for both data encryption and decryption. In the figure below, we depict how plaintext can be turned into ciphertext using the cipher and the secret key. The same key is used when the cipher is used in decryption mode to retrieve the plaintext from the ciphertext. A cipher is a set of two algorithms, the encryption algorithm E(K,m) -> c that takes the encryption key K and the message m to be encrypted as parameters and returns the ciphertext c, and the decryption algorithm D(K,c) -> m that is defined as the inverse operation of encryption and decrypts a message back to the original plaintext.
Generating symmetric keys
Symmetric encryption keys are used by two parties to encrypt and decrypt data securely. Generating and sharing keys generated must be done in a secure manner over an insecure channel. Symmetric keys provide the same security level as their number of bits, i.e., a 128-bit key provides 128-bit security (relative to a brute-force attack) and can be generated using a cryptographic pseudorandom number generator. A library like OpenSSL provides a toolkit to generate a random symmetric key.
The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)
A block cipher is an encryption cipher characterized by two elements, namely its block size and its key size. A plaintext message is divided into blocks of b bits where b is the block size. Said blocks are then processed by the encryption function all at once, adding optional padding at the end when the plaintext size is not an integer multiple of the block size. Most ciphers used for data encryption today are block ciphers due to both their practicality and their efficiency.
The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is the most widely used cipher in the world. It was adopted as an encryption standard by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2001 for the encryption of electronic data. It replaces the deprecated Data Encryption Standard (DES), which was introduced in 1977. AES specifies a set of symmetric-key algorithms and exists in different variants, namely 128, 192, and 256-bit key sizes with a fixed block size of 128-bit. The AES encryption algorithm applies multiple rounds of substitutions and permutations to the initial plaintext and outputs a ciphertext with the same length as the plaintext. It comprises four sub-algorithms, namely AddRoundKey, SubBytes, ShiftRows, and MixColumns, that provide the round keys and diffusion in the ciphertext.
The internal operations of AES cipher
Message Authenticated Code (MAC)
Encryption, whilst the main application of cryptography, does not provide every security guarantee necessary to protect user data. Indeed, user data can still be tampered with in its encrypted state, stored in a database, for example, if proper measures are not applied to check the integrity of said data. Message Authenticated Codes (MACs) produce tags applied to a message in order to ensure its authenticity and integrity. A MAC is a keyed function T = MAC(K,m) that makes it possible for any party that knows the MAC key can verify the integrity of the message by computing the tag on the message and verifying that it corresponds to the received tag. In secure communications and data storage, the practice is to combine a cipher and a MAC in order to ensure data confidentiality, data integrity, and data authenticity.
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