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The essential ingredients of a symmetric cipher are: plaintext, encryption algorithm, secret key, and ciphertext. The encryption algorithm performs substitutions and transformations on the plaintext using the secret key to generate the ciphertext. The decryption algorithm is the reverse of the encryption algorithm, using the same secret key to transform the ciphertext back into the original plaintext. The two general approaches for attacking a cipher are cryptanalysis and brute-force attacks. Cryptanalysis exploits characteristics of the algorithm and known plaintext/ciphertext to deduce the key. A brute-force attack systematically tries every possible key until intelligible plaintext is obtained. For symmetric ciphers, the same single key is used by both parties for encryption and decryption. Asymmetric ciphers use

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137 views

Computer Security As

The essential ingredients of a symmetric cipher are: plaintext, encryption algorithm, secret key, and ciphertext. The encryption algorithm performs substitutions and transformations on the plaintext using the secret key to generate the ciphertext. The decryption algorithm is the reverse of the encryption algorithm, using the same secret key to transform the ciphertext back into the original plaintext. The two general approaches for attacking a cipher are cryptanalysis and brute-force attacks. Cryptanalysis exploits characteristics of the algorithm and known plaintext/ciphertext to deduce the key. A brute-force attack systematically tries every possible key until intelligible plaintext is obtained. For symmetric ciphers, the same single key is used by both parties for encryption and decryption. Asymmetric ciphers use

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Hagos gebreslasie
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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1.what are the essential ingredients of symmetric cipher?

 Plaintext: This is the original intelligible message or data that is fed into the
algorithm as input.
  Encryption algorithm: The encryption algorithm performs various substitutions
and transformations on the plaintext.
  Secret Key: The secret key is also input to the encryption algorithm. The key is
the value independent of the plaintext. The algorithm will produce a different output
depending on the specific key being used at the time. The exact substitutions and
transformations performed by the algorithm depend on the key.
 Cipher text: This is the scrambled message produced as output. It depends on
the plaintext and the key.
 Decryption algorithm: This is essentially the encryption algorithm in reverse. It
takes the cipher text and the secret key and produces the original plaintext.
2. what are the two basic functions used in encryption algorithms?

There are two general approaches to attacking a symmetric encryption scheme. The first attack
is known as cryptanalysis. Cryptanalytic attacks rely on the nature of the algorithm plus
perhaps some knowledge of the general characteristics of the plaintext or even some sample
plaintext-ciphertext pairs. This type of attack exploits the characteristics of the algorithm to
attempt to deduce a specific plaintext or to deduce the key being used. If the attack succeeds in
deducing the key, the effect is catastrophic: All future and past messages encrypted with that
key are compromised.

The second method, known as the brute-force attack, is to try every possible key on a piece of
ciphertext until an intelligible translation into plaintext is obtained. On average, half of all
possible keys must be tried to achieve success.

3.how many keys are reqired for two people to bcommunicate via a cipher?

For symmetric single key is used to encrypt and decrypt while


communicating via cipher while in asymmetric two key are used, one for
encryption one for decryption. So in symmetric sender and receiver uses
same keys while in asymmetric sender uses one while receiver uses different
to decrypt the cipher text.(d) Briefly define the Caesar cipher.Caesar cipher
is the earliest and simplest encryption techniques developed by Julius
Caesar. In this technique, each alphabet in plain text are shifted by certain
amount of position for example “a” may become “d” which means alphabets
are
4.what are the difference between a block cipher and a stream cipher?

What is the difference between a block cipher and a stream cipher?In


stream cipher encryption is done on a digital data one bit or one byte at a
time using random generated keystream while in block cipher a block of
plaintext is treated as one and generates the cipher text of same size using
the symmetric key which is provided to both end

A block cipher processes the plaintext input in fixed-size blocks and produces a block of
ciphertext of equal size for each plaintext block. The algorithm processes longer plaintext
amounts as a series of fixed-size blocks. Typically, symmetric encryption is applied to a unit of
data larger than a single 64-bit or 128-bit block. Plaintext sources must be broken up into a
series of fixed-length block for encryption by a symmetric block cipher. The simplest approach
to multiple-block encryption is known as electronic codebook (ECB) mode, in which plaintext is
handled b bits at a time and each block of plaintext is encrypted using the same key. Typically
b=64 or b=128. Figure 2.3a here shows the ECB mode. A plaintext of length nb is divided into n
b-bit blocks. Each block is encrypted using the same algorithm and the same encryption key, to
produce a sequence of n b-bit blocks of ciphertext. To increase the security of symmetric block
encryption for large sequences of data, a number of alternative techniques have been
developed, called modes of operation (see chapter 19).

A stream cipher processes the input elements continuously, producing output one element at a
time. Although block ciphers are far more common, there are certain applications in which a
stream cipher is more appropriate. A typical stream cipher encrypts plaintext one byte at a
time, as shown in Figure 2.3b. The output of a pseudorandom number generator (the
keystream), is combined one byte at a time with the plaintext stream using the bitwise
exclusive-OR (XOR) operation. With a properly designed pseudorandom number generator, a
stream cipher can be as secure as block cipher of comparable key length.The primary advantage
of a stream cipher is that stream ciphers are almost always faster and use far less code than do
block ciphers.The advantage of a block cipher is that you can reuse keys.

5. what are the two general approaches to attacking a cipher?

The general two approaches for attacking a cipher


1. Cryptanalysis: Cryptanalytic attacks rely on the nature of the algorithm plus
perhaps some knowledge of the general characteristics of the plaintext or even
some samples plaintext-cipher text pairs. This type of attack exploits the
characteristics of the algorithm to attempt to deduce a specific plaintext or to
deduce the key being used. If the attack succeeds in deducing the key, the effect
is catastrophic: All future and past messages encrypted with the key are
compromised.
2.  Brute-force attack: The attacker tries every possible key on a piece of cipher
text until an intelligible translation into plaintext is obtained. On average, half of
all possible keys must be tried to achieve success.

6.list and briefly define types of cryptanalytic attacks based on what is known to the attacker?.

.Cipher Text Only Attack - cryptanalyst obtains a sample of ciphertext without


the plaintext associated with it.
.Chosen Plaintext Attack - cryptanalyst choose a quantity of plaintext and
then obtain the corresponding encrypted ciphertext.
.Adaptive-Chosen Plaintext Attack - chosen plaintext attack, cryptanalyst can
choose the plaintext dynamically and alter his or her choices based on the
result of previous encryptions.
.Chosen Ciphertext Attack - cryptanalyst may be able to choose the sample
of ciphertext and attempt to obtain corresponding decrypted plaintext.
.Adaptive-Chosen Ciphertext Attack - a cryptanalyst can mount an attack of
this type in in a scenario in which he or she has free use of a piece of
decrypted hardware.
7. what is the difference between an unconditionally secure cipher and a computationaly
secure cipher?
What is the difference between an unconditionally secure cipher and a
computation-ally secure cipher?An unconditionally secure cipher is a
scheme such that if the cipher text generatedby the scheme does not
contain enough information to determine uniquely thecorresponding plain
text, no matter how much cipher text is available.

8.using this playfair matrix

M F H I/J K
U N O P Q
Z V W X Y
E L A R G
D S T B C
Encrypt this message:

Must see you over cadogan west.coming at once.


9.using the vigenere cipher,encrypt the word”explanation” using the key leg.

10.encrypt the message “ meet me at the usual place at ten rather than eight oclock” using the
hill cipher with the key(9 4 5,4).show your calculations and the result.

11. use Caesar cipher to encrypt the message “meet me after class”using the letter standing
4places further down the alphabet.

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