I am currently working on security of a switch that runs SNMPv3.
I am expected to code it in such a way, that any SHA (1 - 2-512) is compatible with any AES (128 - 256C).
Everything, like the algorithms alone, works pretty well. The problem is, that its been estabilished, that we are going to use SHA for key generation for both authentification and encryption.
When I want to use, let's say, SHA512 with AES256, there's no problem, since SHA has output of 64B and I need just 32B for key for AES256.
But when I want to use SHA1 with AES256, SHA1 produces only 20B, which is insufficient for the key.
I've searched the internet through and through and I found out, that it's common to use this combination (snmpget, openssl), but I havent found a single word about how are you supposed to prolong the key.
How can I extend the key from 20B to 32B so it works?
P. S.: Yes, I know SHA isn't KDF, yes, I know it's not that common to use this combination, but this is just how it is in my job assignment.
Here is a page discussing your exact question. In short, there is no standard way to do this (as you have already discovered), however, Cisco has adopted the approach outlined in section 2.1 of this document:
Chaining is described as follows. First, run the password-to-key algorithm with inputs of the passphrase and engineID as described in the USM document. This will output as many key bits as the hash algorithm used to implement the password-to-key algorithm. Secondly, run the password-to-key algorithm again with the previous output (instead of the passphrase) and the same engineID as inputs. Repeat this process as many times as necessary in order to generate the minimum number of key bits for the chosen privacy protocol. The outputs of each execution are concatenated into a single string of key bits.
When this process results in more key bits than are necessary, only the most significant bits of the string should be used.
For example, if password-to-key implemented with SHA creates a 40-octet string string for use as key bits, only the first 32 octets will be used for usm3DESEDEPrivProtocol.
Related
I have short messages (<=256bit) that need to be encrypted and published as a (HTTP URL) QR code, along with the public key(s). Because of the QR requirement the result should also stay 256bits long - with the scheme, servername, and base64 encoding the resulting URL already has quite a length, and so the QR becomes "too" big easily.
RSA is out of the question for that key size.
libsodium provides crypto_box functions using ED25519; but for these I need to transport the nonce (24 bytes) as well, and the result is eg. 48 bytes - this makes the QR code already a bit unwieldy.
Furthermore, using one (constant) key pair and another randomly generated per message means the random key needs to be embedded as well, enlarging the result
Using a single key pair doesn't work - If I encrypt with sec1 and pub1, I need to publish exactly these values for decrypting too.
So I'm pondering using plain, raw ED25519 en- and decryption. Are there any pitfalls like with RSA (padding, bad keys (like pub exp 3)) that I need to look out for?
My plan would be to take the input, do an SHA256 of it, use the hash value to pad the input to 256 bits, and then do a plain ED25519 encryption. (I'll prepend a key marker to the result to make key rotation possible.)
What can go wrong? After all, all the complexity in libsodium has to have a reason, right?
Thanks a lot for any help!
I have this hash or encrypted string
861004c2-a9e0-4dae-a436-f46cecf14591
please tell me which encryption or hash algorithms used to generate values like this and how can I decrypt it. i already search web for this string type and check previews threads related to the encryption and hash methods but fail to identify this string.
thanks
Based on the byte values alone it is impossible to distinguish which algorithm was used. It is a desired characteristic of hashes and encryption algorithms that though they are deterministic, their output is indistinguishable from real randomness. It follows that they are also indistinguishable from one another.
Now the formatting may help, as in Hamed's post it may indicate a GUID. But there is no way to know based on the byte values alone.
It looks llike a GUID. GUIDs have different versions and each version's algorithm differs.
For example, Version 1 GUIDs are generated based on the user's network card MAC address and the time while generating the GUID. Version 4 GUIDs use a pseudo-random number.
For more information check here.
I am Implementing the AES128 bit encryption/Decryption in iOS application for sending/receiving data from .net server, I almost done but during unit testing I got some issue in encryption string, some encrypted string are not similar as on .net server, Can say 98 percent strings are correct at both side but issue comes in 2 percent strings , when I match the both side encrypted string then found at iOS end generated string is little short and .net end it is long string. One more thing i found the iOS string is the substring of .net string. When i tried to decrypt the iOS generated encrypted string, it is not decrypted showing null but when I try to decrypt the .net server generated encrypted string (it was larger than the iOS) I am able to se the decrypted string.
Using the same KEY(16 character long at server and iOS end).
could you please suggest the solution or where I am wrong .
Thanks a lot to all.
Original string: "custId=10&mode=1"
KEY= "PasswordPassword"
at iOS encrypted string:
r51TbJpBLYDkcPC+Ei6Rmg==
at .net encrpted string:
r51TbJpBLYDkcPC+Ei6RmtY2fuzv3RsHzsXt/RpFxAs=
padding for encryption = kCCOptionPKCS7Padding;
I followed this tutorial.
http://automagical.rationalmind.net/2009/02/12/aes-interoperability-between-net-and-iphone/
A similar question found on CryptoSE
My Version TL;DR
Essentially .net and iOS both have different implementations, and since the guide you are following is from 2009 I would expect that it is rather out of date by now given there have been at least 1 major revision bump in each of the platforms since then.
Original Answer Gives the following answer:
I can immediately think of four reasons:
They're both not using AES256. I see in the Obj-C document a direct statement that they are using AES256 (unless you deliberately change it), I don't see any statement in the Visual Basic document that says what key size they're using (unless that's what they mean by "Block Bits").
Different keys. AES256 takes a key of 256 bits; there's no standard method to take a five character string and convert that into a 256 bit value. Now, there are a lot of possible methods; there's no particular assurance that they both use the same one.
Different modes of operation. The AES block cipher takes 128-bit values, and translates that into 128-bit values. However, not all our messages can fit into 128 bits, and in addition, sometimes there are other things we'd like to do other than message encryption. A Mode of Operation is a method that takes a block cipher, and uses it as a tool to perform some more generally useful function (such as encrypting a much longer message). There are a number of standard modes of operations, the Obj-C document states that it is using CBC mode; the Visual Basic document has scary sounding words which might be a garbled explination of CBC mode.
IVs. Some modes of operation (such as CBC mode) have the encryptor select an "Initialization Vector" randomly; that can be translated along with the encrypted message (because the decryptor will need that value). One of the things that this Initialization Vector does if you encrypt the message a second time, the second ciphertext will not resemble the first ciphertext at all; that way, someone listening will not be able to deduce that you've just repeated a message. The Obj-C document specifically says that it will pick a random IV (unless to tell give it one yourself).
As you can see, there are a bunch of reasons why the two ciphertexts may be different. One thing you can try: hand the ciphertext from one to the other, and ask them to decrypt it; if they can, you can be pretty sure that both sides are doing basically the same thing.
As you can see, there are a bunch of reasons why the two ciphertexts may be different. One thing you can try: hand the ciphertext from one to the other, and ask them to decrypt it; if they can, you can be pretty sure that both sides are doing basically the same thing.
Right now, this is what I am doing:
1. SHA-1 a password like "pass123", use the first 32 characters of the hexadecimal decoding for the key
2. Encrypt with AES-256 with just whatever the default parameters are
^Is that secure enough?
I need my application to encrypt data with a password, and securely. There are too many different things that come up when I google this and some things that I don't understand about it too. I am asking this as a general question, not any specific coding language (though I'm planning on using this with Java and with iOS).
So now that I am trying to do this more properly, please follow what I have in mind:
Input is a password such as "pass123" and the data is
what I want to encrypt such as "The bank account is 038414838 and the pin is 5931"
Use PBKDF2 to derive a key from the password. Parameters:
1000 iterations
length of 256bits
Salt - this one confuses me because I am not sure where to get the salt from, do I just make one up? As in, all my encryptions would always use the salt "F" for example (since apparently salts are 8bits which is just one character)
Now I take this key, and do I hash it?? Should I use something like SHA-256? Is that secure? And what is HMAC? Should I use that?
Note: Do I need to perform both steps 2 and 3 or is just one or the other okay?
Okay now I have the 256-bit key to do the encryption with. So I perform the encryption using AES, but here's yet another confusing part (the parameters).
I'm not really sure what are the different "modes" to use, apparently there's like CBC and EBC and a bunch of others
I also am not sure about the "Initialization Vector," do I just make one up and always use that one?
And then what about other options, what is PKCS7Padding?
For your initial points:
Using hexadecimals clearly splits the key size in half. Basically, you are using AES-128 security wise. Not that that is bad, but you might also go for AES-128 and use 16 bytes.
SHA-1 is relatively safe for key derivation, but it shouldn't be used directly because of the existence/creation of rainbow tables. For this you need a function like PBKDF2 which uses an iteration count and salt.
As for the solution:
You should not encrypt PIN's if that can be avoided. Please make sure your passwords are safe enough, allow pass phrases.
Create a random number per password and save the salt (16 bytes) with the output of PBKDF2. The salt does not have to be secret, although you might want to include a system secret to add some extra security. The salt and password are hashed, so they may have any length to be compatible with PBKDF2.
No, you just save the secret generated by the PBKDF2, let the PBKDF2 generate more data when required.
Never use ECB (not EBC). Use CBC as minimum. Note that CBC encryption does not provide integrity checking (somebody might change the cipher text and you might never know it) or authenticity. For that, you might want to add an additional MAC, HMAC or use an encryption mode such as GCM. PKCS7Padding (identical to PKCS5Padding in most occurences) is a simple method of adding bogus data to get N * [blocksize] bytes, required by block wise encryption.
Don't forget to prepend a (random) IV to your cipher text in case you reuse your encryption keys. An IV is similar to a salt, but should be exactly [blocksize] bytes (16 for AES).
I'm working on a new licensing scheme for my software, based on OpenSSL public / private key encryption. My past approach, based on this article, was to use a large private key size and encrypt an SHA1 hashed string, which I sent to the customer as a license file (the base64 encoded hash is about a paragraph in length). I know someone could still easily crack my application, but it prevented someone from making a key generator, which I think would hurt more in the long run.
For various reasons I want to move away from license files and simply email a 16 character base32 string the customer can type into the application. Even using small private keys (which I understand are trivial to crack), it's hard to get the encrypted hash this small. Would there be any benefit to using the same strategy to generated an encrypted hash, but simply using the first 16 characters as a license key? If not, is there a better alternative that will create keys in the format I want?
DSA signatures are signficantly shorter than RSA ones. DSA signatures are the twice the size of the Q parameter; if you use the OpenSSL defaults, Q is 160 bits, so your signatures fit into 320 bits.
If you can switch to a base-64 representation (which only requires upper-and-lower case alphanumerics, the digits and two other symbols) then you will need 53 symbols, which you could do with 11 groups of 5. Not quite the 16 that you wanted, but still within the bounds of being user-enterable.
Actually, it occurs to me that you could halve the number of bits required in the license key. DSA signatures are made up of two numbers, R and S, each the size of Q. However, the R values can all be pre-computed by the signer (you) - the only requirement is that you never re-use them. So this means that you could precalculate a whole table of R values - say 1 million of them (taking up 20MB) - and distribute these as part of the application. Now when you create a license key, you pick the next un-used R value, and generate the S value. The license key itself only contains the index of the R value (needing only 20 bits) and the complete S value (160 bits).
And if you're getting close to selling a million copies of the app - a nice problem to have - just create a new version with a new R table.
Did you consider using some existing protection + key generation scheme? I know that EXECryptor (I am not advertising it at all, this is just some info I remember) offers strong protection whcih together with complimentatary product of the same guys, StrongKey (if memory serves) offers short keys and protection against cracking. Armadillo is another product name that comes to my mind, though I don't know what level of protection they offer now. But they also had short keys earlier.
In general, cryptographically strong short keys are based on some aspects of ECC (elliptic curve cryptography). Large part of ECC is patented, and in overall ECC is hard to implement right and so industry solution is a preferred way to go.
Of course, if you don't need strong keys, you can go with just a hash of "secret word" (salt) + user name, and verify them in the application, but this is crackable in minutes.
Why use public key crypto? It gives you the advantage that nobody can reverse-engineer the executable to create a key generator, but key generators are a somewhat secondary risk compared to patching the executable to skip the check, which is generally much easier for an attacker, even with well-obfuscated executables.
Eugene's suggestion of using ECC is a good one - ECC keys are much shorter than RSA or DSA for a given security level.
However, 16 characters in base 32 is still only 5*16=80 bits, which is low enough that brute-forcing for valid keys might be practical, regardless of what algorithm you use.