CRYPTOGRAPHY How does it impact cyber security and why you need to know more?
WHAT YOU DON'T KNOW ABOUT CRYPTOGRAPHY Alice computes g ab = (g b ) a mod p, and Bob computes g ba = (g a ) b mod p C= M e % n y 2 = x 3 + Ax + B And why it can hurt you Kerhoff Euler Fermat
WHO IS THE SPEAKER? 19 Books 29 industry certifications 2 Masters degrees 6 Computer science related patents Over 20 years experience, over 15 years teaching/training Helped create CompTIA Security+, Linux+, Server+. Helped revise CEH v8 Frequent consultant/expert witness Teaches crypto around the world
WHAT DOES CRYPTO DO FOR YOU? Provide data Confidentiality Data integrity Identification and Authentication Non- repudiation
WHAT ARE THE LIMITS OF MOST SECURITY PROFESSIONALS CRYPTO KNOWLEDGE General description of symmetric crypto (AES, DES, Blowfish) General description of assymetric (Diffie Hellman, RSA, DSA, and maybe ECC) General description of digital signatures General description of digital certificates General description of protocols such as TLS
WHY? Why learn crypto? Kerkhoff’s principle Bad crypto solutions Dual_EC_DRBG backdoor Is RSA Secure enough?
KERKHOFF’S PRINCIPLE “A cryptosystem should be secure even if everything about the system, except the key, is public knowledge” -August Kerkhoff The EnigmaDS story hackable_code/
BAD CRYPTO SOLUTIONS Windows SALT What is SALT And why hashing needs it? How does it go wrong? Keep it secret Has to be simple enough to be fast Has to be complex enough to not be ‘guessable’ Poor random number generators How to select hard drive/file encryption
DUAL_EC_DRBG BACKDOOR In 2013 Edward Snowden revealed that it had a backdoor however: In 2004 suspicions of this where around the crypto community In 2006 multiple papers are published suggesting this. In 2006 Bruce Schneier blogged about it. The Cyber Security community may have been in the dark on this issue, but the crypto community was not.
WHAT ABOUT CRYPTOGRAPHIC BACKDOORS? What can you do? Can you prevent them even if you don’t know they are there?
PROBLEMS WITH RSA The most widely used asymmetric cryptographic algorithm, may not be secure enough.
IS RSA STILL SECURE? Heninger and Shacham Zhao and Qi Yeh, Huang, Lin, and Chang Hinek
HENINGER AND SHACHAM Heninger and Shacham (2009) found that RSA implementations that utilized a smaller modulus were susceptible to cryptanalysis attacks. A smaller modulus can increase the efficiency of an RSA implementation, but as Heninger and Shacham (2009) showed, it may also decrease the efficacy.
HENINGER AND SHACHAM Heninger and Shacham (2009) utilized the fact of the smaller modulus to reduce the set of possible factors, thus decreasing the time needed to factor the public key of an RSA implementation. It is in fact a common practice to use a specific modulus e = = (Heninger & Shacham, 2009). If an RSA Implementation is using this common value for e, then factoring the public key is a much simpler process
ZHAO AND QI Zhao and Qi (2007) also utilized implementations that have a smaller modulus operator. The authors of this study also applied modular arithmetic, a subset of number theory, to analyzing weaknesses in RSA. Many implementations of RSA use a shorter modulus operator in order to make the algorithm execute more quickly.
RSA RESOURCES Hinek, M. (2009). Cryptanalysis of RSA and its variants. England: Chapman and Hall. Heninger, N., Shacham, H. (2009). Reconstructing RSA private keys from random key bit. Advances in Cryptology Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1 (1). doi: / _1. Yeh, Y., Huang, T., Lin, H., Chang, Y. (2009). A study on parallel RSA factorization. Journal of Computers, 4 (2), doi: /jcp Zhao, Y., Qi, W. (2007). Small private-exponent attack on RSA with primes sharing bits. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2007, 4779 (2007) doi: / _15
HOW TO LEARN MORE? Professor Dan Boneh’s course online Modern Cryptography: Applied Mathematics for Encryption and Information Security by Chuck Easttom from McGraw Hill (out by August 2015) Applied Cryptography: Protocols, Algorithms, and Source Code in C by Bruce Schneier Secret History: The Story of Cryptography by Bauer Modern Cryptanalysis: Techniques for Advanced Code Breaking by Swenson