I want to create an application, where multiple people should be able to communicate with each other securely (think of a decentral group chat) - sounds easy, but here is my problem:
As far as I understood, with asymmetrical encryption you have a public key and a private key. Everyone who wants to send a message to someone has to encrypt it with the public key and the recipient can decrypt it with the private key.
But if there are more than two people that should be able to read all messages, I don´t know how this should work...
Either everyone has the public and the private key - which I think is a bad idea - or everyone has to have everybodys public key and has to send a seperate message to each recipient.
Also, I want to make a 100% sure, that the one who sends a message really is who he pretends to be. (so nobody is able to "fake" messages)
Is there an encryption algorithm that solves my problem?
Controlling the extend of the recipient group
In a comment to Richard Schwartz' good answer, you ask
Is it possible with this algorithm to ensure that only one is able to invite others? As far as I understood, everybody could distribute the decrypted session key.
When applying the protocol in a group chat scenario, don't let the term "session key" mislead you. Rather, think of the key for symmetric encryption as a "message key": Each time someone sends a message to the group, they should generate a new random symmetric key, encrypt it with every legit receiver's public key separately and prepend all these cryptograms to the symmetrically encrypted message. This way, each sender decides independently whom they consider a part of the legit recipients group of their own sent messages.
This will give the protocol some more transmission overhead, but this probably won't matter in practice. What could matter is the 'cost' of getting larger amounts of 'good' randomness (entropy) to generate sufficiently unpredictable message keys. So an acceptable optimization might be that, if the group of legit recipients has remained the same, a sender might re-use the session key of their own previously sent message. Never though should they re-purpose a sessions key received from another group member for sending messages of their own.
Off course, even if each sender decides independently whom they consider a legit recipient of their message, you can't keep any legit recipient from compromising messages they received: They can simply forward the messages unencrypted (or encrypted for someone not in the original recipient group) to whomever they want.
Ensuring authenticity
In an edit to your original question, you added
Also, I want to make a 100% sure, that the one who sends a message really is who he pretends to be. (so nobody is able to "fake" messages)
Encryption can't do that, but cryptography has another way to make sure that
the message actually comes from whom claimed to have sent it
the message hasn't been tampered with since
And the way of ensuring these things is signatures, which also are something that public-private-key cryptography enables. Let senders sign their messages with their private key. (Which usually means 'encrypting' a cryptographically secure hash of the message with the private key.) And let receivers verify the signatures (by 'decrypting' the signature with the sender's public key and comparing the result with a hash of the message they computed themselves.)
Don't roll your own anything (except when you should)
Richard's answers advices you to not roll your own (pseudo) random number generator. For anything you plan to use in production, I'd extend this to anything encryption:
Don't invent your own protocols
Don't invent your own cyphers, signatures or hash functions
Don't invent your own way of gathering entropy
Don't roll your own implementations of any of the above, even if invented by others
Instead, use well-established cryptography libraries. These are written and reviewed by experts in both cryptographic theory and in the practices of writing secure software. And while even these libraries are often enough found to have (sometimes embarrassing) security issues, nothing you'll come up with yourself will be nearly as secure as them.
Though, for learning, implementing any or all of the listed stuff (including pseudo random number generators) is great exercise and helps you understand at least some aspects of the underlying cryptography. And this understanding is important, as it's often difficult enough to correctly and securely use the well-established libraries, even when you do have some knowledge of the concepts they reveal through their interfaces.
And of course for innovating within cryptography, inventing new stuff (and getting it scrutinizingly reviewed by the community of experts in the field) is necessary, too. That new stuff just shouldn't be used for anything serious before it has passed that review successfully.
I assume you mean asymmetric encryption, not asynchronous encryption.
In most cases, we don't actually use an asymmetric cipher to encrypt the content of messages. That's because messages can be large, and asymmetric ciphers are slow in comparison to symmetric ciphers. It's also because of the issue you are contending with here: in a multi-party commmunicaiton, you'd like to be able to just send the message once and have everybody be able to read it. So the trick is that we combine asymmetric and symmetric techniques into a protocol that solves the problem.
First, we generate a random symmetric key which we can call the "session key". We're going to distribute this session key to all recipients, but we need to do this securely. Here's where we're actually going to use asymmetric encryption. We encrypt the session key once for each recipient using each of their public keys and an asymmetric cipher (such as RSA), and we send the encrypted session key to each recipeint. We can send it to each recipient separately, or we can just build a structure that looks like this:
"recip1|recip1EncryptedSessionKey|recip2|recip2EncryptesSessionKey..."
and send the whole thing out to all recipients, each of whom will be able to parse it and decrypt their own encrypted copy of the session key. (This is generally how it's done in encrypted email: the list of all encrypted versions of the session key for all recipients is enclosed with the message, and everyone gets the exact same email.)
Once we've securely distributed the session key to all recipients, we can use the session key to encrypt each message just once with a symmetric cipher (such as AES), and send the same encrypted message to all recipients. Since they all have received a copy of the session key, they can all read it and act on it.
Note that as in all things having to do with encryption, it is crucial that the session key is really random. Don't just rely on a plain vanilla random number generator for it, and for heavens sake don't roll your own. Make sure that you use a cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generator.
A real chat system would likely be quite a bit more complicated, probably with a mechanism for re-establishing a new session key periodically, and the details of a secure protocol can be quite intricate. I.e., consider how you would protect against a bad-guy stepping in and fooling everyone into using a session key of his choosing! But the basics are as above.
Related
I have searched for HOURS on how this works and I just can't get how this can be. The only given definitions are that public keyed encrypted message can only be decrypted by private key. To me, that's just nonsense and I will explain.
A website needs to be downloaded by your browser which also means that Javascript scripts and all the other stuff are accessible to anyone that catches your website if he wishes too. This also means that now, this person knows how you calculate your stuff with your public key making it possible WITHOUT the private key to decrypt it.
I'm just trying to figure out how this works and to me it does not make sens that you CANNOT decrypt an ecrypted text from a public key when you have access to all the calculations made from the side it encrypted.
I mean, when you send a password for example, first, on YOUR end, the browser's end, it encrypts the data to be recieved by the server. By encrypting the data from the browser's end, anyone that took a look on your source code can know how you encrypted it which now can be used to decrypt it. I am creating a new encryption system for our website where the server randomly creates a session key that can only be used by the user with the corresponding session. So only the 2 computers can talk to each other with the same key so if you use the same key on another computer, it just won't work as each key is stored for each session which the key dies after a set amount of time. With what I read, this seams to be called a symetric key system. I want to try and program my own assymetric key system but in all cases when I read, I can only figure out that no matter what happens as an encryption on the client's side, if a malicious person intercepts just before sending the information, he has access to how the encryption worked and therefor, does not need the private key on the server side as he just needs to reverse the process knowing how it was done on the client's side.
I'm starting to think myself as stupid thinking that way.
I'll add a little more information as I think we don't quite catch what I mean. When sending a password, say my name "David" and let's name our user WebUser. We will name our maleficient user BadGuy. So BadGuy hapopens to integrate himself in between WebUser and his browser. BadGuy also recieves ALL javascripts of the webpage permitting him to see how the calculations work before it is sent. WebUser enters his password "David" which is submitted to the javascript encryption system. Right off the bat, BadGuy does not need to decrypot anything as he already caught the password. BUT when the website responds, BadGuy has all the calculations and can use the receieved encrypted data and decrypt it using the decryption calculations he can see in the recieved web pages code.
So the only thing I can understand is that Assymetric keys are used for encryption which technically is decryptable using public known numbers. But in cas of RSA, these 2 numbers are so large that it would take years to figure out the known decryptor. As I can also undersnat is that it is pretty much easier to create the 2 numbers from the private number. But in any case, the encryption process usually ends up with a shared temporary intimate key between the two parties for for faster commuinication and that noone can ever prevent a BagGuy between User and Browser but with todays technocolgies, the real threat is more MiTM attacks where one will sniff the network. In all cases, there is no definate way to communicate 100% of the data in a undecryptable way as at least 50% of it is decryptable i/e data coming from one side or data going to the other side.
Assymetric encryption has two keys, a public and a private key, as you correctly described, so don't feel stupid. Both keys can be used for encryption and decryption, however, if data encrypted by the public key can only be decrypted by the private key and data encrypted by the private key can only be decrypted by the public key.
As a result, in order to be successfully involved in a communication using assymetric encryption you will need to have both a public and a private key.
You share your public key with others, that is, whatever data you receive, it will be encrypted with the public key. You will subsequently be able to decrypt it using your private key, which is your secret. When you send data to the other side of the communication, you encrypt it using your private key and the other side, which has your public key will be able to decrypt it.
Consider the example of versioning. You are involved in a project with some team members. When you pull the commits of others, it is encrypted with your public key, so once it is downloaded at your end, you will be able to decrypt it via your private key. As you work and do your commits, you will push the changes into the repository, encrypted using your private key. The other side of the communication already has your public key and will be able to decrypt it. It is important that you do not share your private key with anyone, so your team-mates will not be able to impersonate you, committing malicious code in your name. You can share your public key with anyone, but it is recommended to share it only with trusted people, like your team-mates, so no one else will be able to decrypt anything encrypted by your private key.
Essentially your public key is a ridiculously large number, which is the result by multiplying two primes (private key). The two primes could be found out by prime factorization, but since the public key is a very very large number, doing the prime factorization would take such a looong time that no one will sit and wait for the time (centuries) while the factorization is being executed and the results are found out.
A session id is a value which identifies a session. If there is a single such value, then it is not an assymetric encryption, as there is no public and private key involved and once someone steals the session ID, as you correctly pointed out, the malicious third person/system can impersonate the actual user and do nasty things. So the problem you have identified actually exists, but this is not a new problem and solutions were implemented. The solution you are looking for is HTTPS. Once your site gets a proper certificate, you will be able to use assymetric encryption safe and sound. Under the hood the server will have the public key of the user's session, while the user will use the private key to encrypt/decrypt and if a middle man intercepts the public key of the session (which is not a session id), the malicious third person will not be able to impersonate the actual user. Read more here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Layer_Security
extending the previous answer
I'm just wandering how an attacker positionned between the user and his browser cannot intercept the connection details when they are clear texte to beggin with and to end with.
The magic here is called DH key exchange.
The symmetric encryption key is derived using Diffie–Hellman key exchange, where the common encryption key is exchanged.
Any "listening" party (your BadGuy) woudn't be able to derive the session key even by sniffing out the whole communications. The server will use its certificate and private key to make sure the client communicates with the legitimate target. This prevents an active "man in the middle" to pose as a false server.
it does not make sens that you CANNOT decrypt an ecrypted text from a public key when you have access to all the calculations made from the side it encrypted.
Asymmetric cryptography is based on so called "trapdoor" funtions. It means it is easy to calculate the function one way (e.g. encrypt data), but very difficult (not feasible) to od it opposite way without some secret value (private key). Indeed sometimes it is difficult to understand it and there are a lot of constraints under the asymmetric encryption is really secure. That's why you would always use some trusted library than do it yourself.
By encrypting the data from the browser's end, anyone that took a look on your source code can know how you encrypted it which now can be used to decrypt it.
Not without the random secret key, which is derived between the client and server during the key exchange (see the first paragraph).
I am creating a new encryption system for our website where the server randomly creates a session key that can only be used by the user with the corresponding session.
It's one of the rules in the field of cryptography - do not design your own crypto!
That's usually a bad idea. Please note the currently used secure channels (SSL, TLS, .. based on RSA, ECC) are designed, reviewed and used by a lot of smart people who know what they are doing, how to mitigate different attack vectors. And IMHO it is still not perfect, but it's the best we have.
Somehow I don't get HMACs.
I once asked Why do I need HMACs when we do have public key signatures?, and I think I got this one. Easier to compute, and so on ...
But, what I do not get is why we need HMACs at all, respectively what kind of problem they are solving.
From my understanding, HMACs ...
provide a way to make sure the message has not been tampered,
are "secured" by a secret, but symmetric key.
Hence for calculating the HMAC (either initially or for verification) I do need to know the secret key.
Now, if I can exchange this key in a secret way without it being tampared, I could also exchange the message in the very same secret way without it being tampered, don't I?
Okay, now you could argue that you only need to exchange the key once, but you may have multiple messages. That's fine.
But if we now have a secret key that must be kept secret by all parties, we could also directly use symmetric encryption using the very same secret key to encrypt the message, couldn't we?
Of course, an HMAC shall provide a solution against tampering, but if I only have an encrypted message without the secret key and a reasonable encryption algorithm, I can not change that encrypted message in a way that a) decryption still works, and b) a meaningful decrypted message appears.
So what do I need an HMAC actually for?
Or - where is the point that I am missing?
You're assuming that it is impossible to tamper with an encrypted message without knowing the key used for encryption. This is not the case and a dangerous assumption to make. There are several things possible even if you only have access to the ciphertext:
Corruption of a suffix of the message: this can leak information about the content through error messages, timing and possibly other ways.
Corruption of ranges of the message for some modes (ECB, CFB and possibly others): same as above but the attacker has more ways to trigger the wanted behaviour.
Flipping of arbitrary bits in a single block (not knowing their initial value though) and corruption of the following block (CFB): If some bits are known to the attacker he can set them to the value he wants.
Flipping of arbitrary bits in the whole message for stream ciphers or stream cipher equivalent modes for block ciphers: This can avoid corruption altogether.
Thus it is very important to verify that no attacker tampered with the message before processing even a single byte of the decrypted content. Since there are again some pitfalls in doing this using ad-hoc verification or simple hashing there is a need for MACs of which HMAC is one example.
I did some research on the topic but could not find anything similar to my question. So I hope some of you great guys may help me out.
I want to use AES128 encryption (CFB-Mode) for the networking in my application between two individual clients. The data being exchanged consists only of textual strings of a specific structure, for example, the first bytes allways tell the recipient the kind of message they are receiving, so they can process them. With AES I want to ensure the confidentiality of the message, but now the question of "integrity" arises.
Normaly you would consider using a MAC. But isn't it guaranteed that nobody has altered the message, if the recipient is able to decrypt it correctly, i.e. that the message can be used correctly in his application because of the string's format? Wouldn't altering (even 1 bit) the encrypted message by a third party result in garbage during decryption?
Furthermore let's assume that the application is a multi-party peer-to-peer-game, where two of the players are communicating with each other on a private but AES-encrypted channel. Now the originator of the message is not playing fair and intentionally sending a fraudulent encrypted message to convey an impression that the message has been altered by a random third party (to force a player to quit). Now the recipient would have no chance to determine if the message has been altered or if the sender acts fraudulent, am I right? So Integrity would not be of much use in such a situation and could be neglected?
This may sound like an odd and out of world example. But it's something I recently encountered in a similar application and I am asking myself if there is a solution to the problem or if I got the basic Idea of AES encryption.
As you said, you may detect changes in the format of the plain text message after encryption. But at what level would it go wrong? Do you have something that is large and redundant enough to be tested? What are you going to do if the altered plain text results in some obscure exception somewhere down the line? With CFB (like most modes) an attacker can make sure that only the last part of the message is altered, for instance, and leave the first blocks intact.
And you are worried about cheats as well.
In my opinion, you are much better off using a MAC or HMAC algorithm, or a cipher mode that provides integrity/authentication on top of confidentiality (EAX or GCM for instance). If you are sure nobody else has the symmetric key, an authentication check (such as a MAC) will prove that the data has been signed by the correct key. So no, the user cannot claim that the data has been changed in transport if the authenticity checks succeed.
The next question becomes: can you trust that the symmetric key is only in possession of the other player? For this you might want to use some sort of PKI scheme (using assymetric keys) together with a key exchange mechanism such as DH. But that is for a later, if you decide to go that way.
This is a bit out of my depth, but...
Yes, modifying the encrypted bytes of an AES encrypted message should cause the decryption to fail (this has been my experience with the c# implementation). The client who decrypts will know the message is invalid. EDIT: apparently this is not the case. Looks like you'd need a CRC or hash to verify the message was successfully decrypted. The more serious problem is if the secret AES key is leaked (and in a peer-to-peer environment, the key has to be sent so the receiver can decrypt the message at all). Then a 3rd party can send messages as if they were a legitimate client, and they will be accepted as OK.
Integrity is much harder. I'm not entirely sure how robust you want things to be, but I suspect you want to use public key encryption. This allows you to include a hash of the message (like a signature or MAC) based on the private key to assert the message validity. The receiver uses the public key to verify the hash and thus the original message is OK. The main advantage of public key encryption over symmetric encryption like AES is you don't have to send the private key, only the public key. This makes it much harder to impersonate a client. SSL/TLS uses public key encryption.
In any case, once you have identified a client sending invalid messages, you're in the world of deciding to trust that client or not. That is, is the corruption due to malicious behaviour (what you're worried about)? Or a faulty client implementation (incompetence)? Or a faulty communications link?. And this is where encryption (or at least my knowledge of it) won't help you any more!
Additional regarding integrity:
If you assume no one else has access to your secret key, a CRC, hash, or HMAC would all suffice to ensure you detected changes. Simply take the body of your message, calculate the CRC, hash, whatever and append as a footer. If the hash doesn't match when you decrypt, the message has been altered.
The assumption that the secret key remains secret is quite reasonable. Especially if after some number of messages you generate new ones. SSH and WiFi's WPA both generate new keys periodically.
If you can't assume the secret key is secret, then you need to go to PKI to sign the message. With the AES key in a malicious 3rd party, they'll just generate whatever messages they want with the key.
There may be some mileage in including a sequence number in your message based on a RNG. If you use the same RNG and same seed for both parties, they should be able to predict what sequence number comes next. A 3rd party would need to intercept the original seed, and know how many messages have been sent to send valid but forged messages. (This assumes no messages can ever be lost or dropped.)
I know this is more or less an algorithm or design problem and not so much programming, but I hope it's alright.
I am using a blinded message and having it signed by C. After the signing I want to remove the blinding and have other users A and B be able to share the message. Is this safe or can the signer still read these messages if they have the public and private keys? Should I take further steps after unblinding to ensure the confidentiality?
I have read various math formulas explaining how this works, but I am more of a programmer than a mathematician. I want to ensure the confidentiality and I am not sure if it's working.
Signatures do not ensure confidentiality. If you have data which must be transmitted but should remain confidential, then you must use a transmission mechanism which ensures confidentiality.
You apparently also want the message to be signed by entity C, but without giving any clue on the message to C. Generally speaking, the signing entity only needs to know the hash of the signed data. The signer may then try to "guess" the data by hashing potential messages and see if one matches the hash it received. This is the point where blind signatures come into action: to prevent the signer from even seeing the hashed message.
It so happens that with RSA, the hashed message can be recovered from the signature and the signer's public key. The signer (C) certainly knows his own public key. Hence, the signature itself must be kept confidential (otherwise, it would make no sense to use blind signatures in the first place). Thus, whatever mechanism you use to keep the message itself confidential when it is transmitted from A to B, must also be applied to the signature (and the signature is not that mechanism).
I'm new to implementing encryption and am still learning basics, it seems.
I have need for symmetric encryption capabilities in my open source codebase. There are three components to this system:
A server that stores some user data, and information about whether or not it is encrypted, and how
A C# client that lets a user encrypt their data with a simple password when sending to the server, and decrypt with the same password when receiving
A JavaScript client that does the same and therefore must be compatible with the C# client's encryption method
Looking at various JavaScript libraries, I came across SJCL, which has a lovely demo page here: http://bitwiseshiftleft.github.com/sjcl/demo/
From this, it seems that what a client needs to know (besides the password used) in order to decrypt the ciphertext is:
The initialization vector
Any salt used on the password
The key size
Authentication strength (I'm not totally sure what this is)
Is it relatively safe to keep all of this data with the ciphertext? Keep in mind that this is an open source codebase, and there is no way I can reasonably hide these variables unless I ask the user to remember them (yeah, right).
Any advice appreciated.
Initialization vectors and salts are called such, and not keys, precisely because they need not be kept secret. It is safe, and customary, to encode such data along with the encrypted/hashed element.
What an IV or salt needs is to be used only once with a given key or password. For some algorithms (e.g. CBC encryption) there may be some additional requirements, fulfilled by chosing the IV randomly, with uniform probability and a cryptographically strong random number generator. However, confidentiality is not a needed property for an IV or salt.
Symmetric encryption is rarely enough to provide security; by itself, encryption protects against passive attacks, where the attacker observes but does not interfere. To protect against active attacks, you also need some kind of authentication. SJCL uses CCM or OCB2 encryption modes which combine encryption and authentication, so that's fine. The "authentication strength" is the length (in bits) of a field dedicated to authentication within the encrypted text; a strength of "64 bits" means that an attacker trying to alter a message has a maximum probability of 2-64 to succeed in doing so without being detected by the authentication mechanism (and he cannot know whether he has succeeded without trying, i.e. having the altered message sent to someone who knows the key/password). That's enough for most purposes. A larger authentication strength implies a larger ciphertext, by (roughly) the same amount.
I have not looked at the implementation, but from the documentation it seems that the SJCL authors know their trade, and did things properly. I recommend using it.
Remember the usual caveats of passwords and Javascript:
Javascript is code which runs on the client side but is downloaded from the server. This requires that the download be integrity-protected in some way; otherwise, an attacker could inject some of his own code, for instance a simple patch which also logs a copy of the password entered by the user somewhere. In practice, this means that the SJCL code should be served across a SSL/TLS session (i.e. HTTPS).
Users are human beings and human beings are bad at choosing passwords. It is a limitation of the human brain. Moreover, computers keep getting more and more powerful while human brains keep getting more or less unchanged. This makes passwords increasingly weak towards dictionary attacks, i.e. exhaustive searches on passwords (the attacker tries to guess the user's password by trying "probable" passwords). A ciphertext produced by SJCL can be used in an offline dictionary attack: the attacker can "try" passwords on his own computers, without having to check them against your server, and he is limited only by his own computing abilities. SJCL includes some features to make offline dictionary attacks more difficult:
SJCL uses a salt, which prevents cost sharing (usually known as "precomputed tables", in particular "rainbow tables" which are a special kind of precomputed tables). At least the attacker will have to pay the full price of dictionary search for each attacked password.
SJCL uses the salt repeatedly, by hashing it with the password over and over in order to produce the key. This is what SJCL calls the "password strengthening factor". This makes the password-to-key transformation more expensive for the client, but also for the attacker, which is the point. Making the key transformation 1000 times longer means that the user will have to wait, maybe, half a second; but it also multiplies by 1000 the cost for the attacker.