Symmetric Cryptography
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>> Now I mentioned this a little bit earlier when we were
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talking about historic uses of cryptography.
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But let's go ahead and define
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this process a little bit more clearly,
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and then we're going to talk about
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some of the difficulties that
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come with symmetric cryptography
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as well as some of the benefits.
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Then we're going to talk about
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the two types of symmetric algorithms.
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We have stream algorithms and we have block algorithms.
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Don't forget algorithm in cipher mean the same thing.
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Sometimes I'll say stream cipher,
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I might say stream algorithm
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just to mix it up a little bit,
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but no difference between the terms.
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Symmetric cryptography.
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This is what all of
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our historical types of
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cryptography or the Caesar
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cipher and the Enigma machine,
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they were all symmetric.
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We really didn't have an asymmetric algorithm
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until the late '70s.
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Two gentlemen, Whitfield Diffie and
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Martin Hellman came out
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with the Diffie-Hellman algorithm,
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which was our first asymmetric,
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so everything historical is
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going to fall in the category of being symmetric.
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Now, symmetric cryptography,
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remember we have one key shared between two parties.
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I'm going to use that key to encrypt,
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you're going to use the key to decrypt.
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Now the tricky part is we have
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to share that key between us.
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Now, remember we referred to that as being
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out-of-band key exchange and
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our encryption is only as strong as our key exchanges.
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If we have weak key exchange,
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we have weak encryption
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because anybody could intercept that key.
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I have to find a good secure way for me
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to get the secret to you.
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That's problem number 1.
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Now the second problem is
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that symmetric cryptography is
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not great for large environment.
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In a large environment,
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I need a key with
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every individual I'm going to be communicating with.
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Every individual needs a key
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for everyone they'll be communicating with.
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We wind up having a lot of keys in
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symmetric environments if we were going to
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have it implement just purely symmetrically.
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If you think about this, let's say that I want to start
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a dog walking club and I get
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50 of my closest friends and
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neighbors to participate in this dog walking club,
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and we've decided that we're going to want
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anybody in our club to be able
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to walk anybody else's dog.
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I've got 50 people.
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I'm going to need a house key for the 49 other people and
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each of them are going to need a house key for
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the 49 other people in our group.
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Even though 50 isn't
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a tremendously large number of folks,
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the number of keys we're going to have in
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that type of environment is going to be very large.
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As a matter of fact, there's actually
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a formula that you can use.
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This is going to be referenced later,
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but I'll just mention it now.
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The formula is n times n minus 1 divided by
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2 is the number
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of keys that you would need in a symmetric environment.
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If we just think about that, it would be 50,
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which is n times n minus 1,
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which is 49, divided by 2.
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That means in our little dog walking club,
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there would be 1,225
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keys distributed between the parties.
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That's a lot of keys to have to keep up with.
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Symmetric cryptography does not
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grow well, it just doesn't.
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Now the last problem with
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symmetric cryptography, if you'll remember,
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we talked earlier that
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our desired security services are privacy,
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authenticity, integrity, and non-repudiation.
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The only one of those security services we can
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get with symmetric cryptography is privacy.
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We cannot get integrity,
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can't get non-repudiation,
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or authenticity only privacy.
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Now we do get good privacy with symmetric cryptography,
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but we don't get those other elements.
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If you think about that, those are some big problems.
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We have out-of-band key exchange that makes it difficult.
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You can't use symmetric cryptography
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in a large environment,
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and we don't get authenticity or integrity,
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so of course, we don't get non-repudiation.
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Why in the world do we even want to use
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symmetric cryptography then with all those problems?
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Well, the reason that we want to is because it's fast.
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Very beneficial to have a means to exchange data that
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has very quick performance
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because we've already said
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there's always a trade-off for security,
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and we want to minimize the costs
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associated with security as much as possible.
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We've got the pros and cons.
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To be honest with you,
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the most difficult thing about
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symmetric cryptography
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is all the different names you can call it.
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As a matter of fact, you can
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call it symmetric cryptography,
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of course, but you can also call it secret key.
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You can call it private-key cryptography.
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You can call it shared key
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because the two parties are sharing the same key,
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and session keys are also symmetric in nature.
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You need to know all of those names
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because they may use them interchangeably.
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Symmetric, secret, private,
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shared, session keys,
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they're all symmetric cryptography.
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The heart and soul of it,
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same key is used to encrypt that is used to decrypt.
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Now with our symmetric ciphers,
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we said the algorithm itself
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is the type of math that's used.
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Symmetric ciphers can specifically either
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use stream functions or block functions.
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Symmetric ciphers are either stream or block.
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Let me talk about that just a little bit more.
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When we look at stream encryption,
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what we're doing is we're encrypting one bit at a time,
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or possibly one bite at a time
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if we're doing one character at a time.
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The idea is bit by bit by bit, we encrypt data.
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Now the alternative to that is using
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a block cipher and
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a block cipher chunks data into blocks,
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and each chunk goes through a series of
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math functions called S-boxes, substitution boxes.
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That's what I demonstrated several
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videos ago when we talked
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about the algorithms and how they work,
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because block ciphers are the most common by far.
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All this data we chunk it may be in 128 bit blocks.
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Each block goes through a series of
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math functions where substitution happens,
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and that's how the magic of block ciphers work.
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Just to look at this a little bit more depth
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with stream ciphers.
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Stream ciphers frequently use [NOISE]
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a process called XORing or eXclusive OR.
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I've got a little example of how XOR works down below.
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If you take a look,
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what you can see is I have
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some characters and I've got two bytes worth of data.
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Up at the top the 1101001
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and its corresponding second byte of data,
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we'll assume that that's plain text.
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Then we have the XOR function,
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which is what our key is going to do,
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and then underneath we
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have the ciphertext that's produced.
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Now I know this looks complex,
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it's actually really easy.
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What happens is each bit
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of the plain text is matched with a bit of the key,
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and if the values are the same, ciphertext becomes zero.
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If the values are different,
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the ciphertext becomes one.
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If you look at this, one and zero are different,
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so the ciphertext is just one.
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Same thing, one and zero are different, ciphertext one.
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Zero and one, different ciphertext one.
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Different, different, all the way to the last two bits.
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The second bit from the end here,
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zero and zero are the
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same so the ciphertext becomes zero.
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One and one are the same.
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Ciphertext becomes zero.
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Ultimately, this XOR process just requires a bit of
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the plain text being XORed against the bit of the key.
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If the values are alike,
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the ciphertext becomes zero,
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if the values are different, ciphertext becomes one.
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Now this is actually very
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quick to produce encrypted text using XORing.
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That's the thing about stream ciphers.
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They are fast.
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Boom, boom, boom.
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As matter of fact, a lot of
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times they're going to be used with
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hardware encryption devices because you need
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a hardware encryptor to keep up with
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the capabilities of how fast stream ciphers can be.
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Now the downside.
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If it's super quick to encrypt,
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it may also be super-quick to decrypt.
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That usually goes hand in hand.
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The idea is stream ciphers are very fast,
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but they don't provide
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the same sophistication of
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encryption that a block cipher would.
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Long story short, stream ciphers
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are considered to be less secure.
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Of note, I want you to remember the algorithm
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RC4 is the only stream cipher
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that I want you to know for this course.
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It's the only one that's going to come up,
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it's the only one we're going to ask you about.
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Is AES a stream or a block? It's a block.
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Why? Because it's not RC4.
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The only time I want you to answer
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stream is when you see RC4.
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But Kelly, what about our C2?
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Is it RC4?
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Nope. Then it's a block.
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Only RC4 is the stream we care about.
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Then remember, this is very comparable to
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the illustration we had earlier
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when we were looking at algorithms and keys.
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At each one of these S-boxes,
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there is a math function that's performed.
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Like we said, with your block ciphers
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static it's chunked into blocks,
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in this case maybe 64 bits.
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Each block goes through series of math functions.
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Which math function and
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in what order and how many math functions,
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that's what the key dictates.
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Now we have a list here of symmetric algorithms.
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I think you might see a question or two where you have to
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know whether an algorithm is symmetric or asymmetric.
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You want to take a look at these may be
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screenshot them and make
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sure that you can associate these
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with being symmetric in nature.
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In a little bit I'll show you the list
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of our asymmetric algorithms also.
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Just to wrap things up,
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we gave an overview of
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symmetric cryptography and talked
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about some of its pros and cons.
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Then we looked at stream ciphers versus block ciphers,
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and we also just gave a list of
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some of the common symmetric algorithms.
Up Next
Asymmetric Cryptography
Authenticity
Integrity and Non-Repudiation
Common Asymmetric Algorithms
Symmetric vs. Asymmetric Review
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