Talk:Student Projects:Encryption Use/Project Summary

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Project Title

A Survey on the Use of Encryption and Encryption Schemes

Team Members

Project Description

A survey of the history of encryption/cryptography shows the progression of encryption techniques. Maybe more importantly, it shows a progression of adversarial attacks and to what lengths adversaries will go to in order to decipher messages. Starting in WWI and leading all the way to today, history has shown that adversaries can and will somehow obtain transmitted cipher text. It is this realization that has lead the modern cryptographic/security community to make the fundamental assumption that adversaries are given cipher texts. Even further, they make the assumption that the encryption schemes which produce the cipher text are possessed by the adversary, leaving the security of the scheme to encryption keys (public, private, or both).

Although most of the cryptographic community is highly skilled and trained to understand these fundamental assumptions which translate into more secure schemes, many of these people are not the ones applying the encryption schemes to cyber security in industry. Even with Room 40, Ultra, etc. in which there were highly skilled personnel coming up with the encryption schemes, the use of these schemes was carried out by military and government officials that used the schemes in such ways that uncovered the underlying keys to the enemies. In modern days, we have a similar situation, however the people participating are different. Industry personnel are mostly unfamiliar with cryptography concepts and may apply encryption schemes in the wrong way, sacrificing security. Even with an encryption scheme that is 100% secure against all attacks (birthday, man in middle, etc.), using it incorrectly can yield it insecure (i.e. ECB mode). We have already seen examples of this in the Diebold DRE voting system, and we will show other examples of such incorrect use.

Further, government policy places many restrictions on encryptions standards and implementations, such that many companies and consumers are unable to use the strongest encryption methods. This causes a heterogeneous pool of encryption schemes used across many applications, which although good for security purposes, disables implementors to learn a common encryption model that would prevent them from using encryption incorrectly.

This project will discuss the history of encryption from Room 40 to RSA, and will point out the key events which led to the formulation of the current structure of encryption and possibly a hypothesis as to how the evolution of this structure will continue in the future.

Paper Outline

1.Intro

  • Similar to project description on front page
    2.Background on Encryption (Josh)
  • Basic encryption concepts
  • Terms and vocab used throughout the paper
    3.Historical Incidents (Andrew)
  • How has encryption been (mis)used in the past
      • Room 40, Ultra, Magic, Venona, Diebold, Open Source

    • 4.Encryption Policy (Steven, John)

  • Government regulations and policies
      • Export Regulations, Key Escrow/Recovery, Computer Security Act of 1987

    5.Analysis (All)

  • Analysis of trends and how policy has played a role in encryption events
    6.Conclusion
  • Concluding remarks and looking torward what should be done in the future.

    References

    General

    Room 40

    Ultra

    Magic (Purple)

    Venona

    Policy

    Project Timeline

    Monday November 8-One page description due

    November 8-Nov 15-Each person working on their sections (1-4)

    Monday November 15-Draft of first 4 Sections done

    November 15-Nov 29-Some people piecing sections 1-4 together and revising to make them flow well. Some people working on analysis and conclusions sections.

    Monday November 29-Draft of Analysis and Conclusion done

    November 29-Dec 3-Revising and putting all the pieces together

    Friday December 3 -Rough draft due

    December 3-Dec 10-Final revisions

    Friday December 10-Final draft due
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