[erlang-questions] Encrypting/Decrypting data

[Joe Armstrong]

On Mon, Oct 31, 2011 at 4:45 AM, Jon Watte <jwatte@REDACTED> wrote:
> Crypto is actually quite hard, and building something "perfectly secure" is
> even harder (some say impossible).

I agree

> For passwords, it's often the case that you want to store the password
> salted and one-way encrypted using something like bcrypt() to avoid brute
> force attacks.
> For credit card information, medical information, and similar, the technical
> requirements may be significantly harder -- it may very well include
> dedicated hardware that can be called upon to encrypt/decrypt data, but does
> not leak the key separately.
> A good book to get an understanding of many nuances is "Applied
> Cryptography" by
> Schneier. http://www.amazon.com/Applied-Cryptography-Protocols-Algorithms-Source/dp/0471117099
> If you actually want to implement crypto in your own system, you can do a
> *lot* worse than reading that book!

Yup - but this is just about algorithms which is only 10% of the story
- rest is about
deciding what attacks to protect against. (I have *never* seen a book
that discusses this
are they any?)

You have to think about *exactly* how an attack will take place, then
make sure it can't happen
this is *very* difficult.

If you dig up the standard for "Secure Electronic Transactions" you'll
see what I mean.

Crytography is the bit that is "well-understood" - attacks might
involve peeping at the memory of your program
while it is executing - does your program use virtual memory when this
swaps to disk is the swap area on disk
encrypted? - could somebody install a password sniffer in the firmware
of your keyboard?

Virtually all attacks on secure data are through side-channels, ie the
crypto-algorithms are not broken
they are bypassed by a smart (or even not so smart) trick - (Last
month I was phoned up twice, by a guy
who said my windows machine was hacked, and who wanted to to "help" me
by getting me to download a
program to fix this)

You need to think about what kind of data protection you need and what
kind of attack you are protecting against
without a clear idea of the attack you are sunk. Example your disk
contains encrypted passwords, but somewhere
on the disk is a plain text copy of the password - in an unencrypted
swap file, or in .bash_history or somewhere
you never thought of ...

Then having decided on the attack you have to decide "how difficult do
I want to make life for the attacker?"

Some cryptosystems will take (theoretically) a long time to break
(until the theory is shown to be wrong :-)
others are pretty simple.

> (And, yes, crypto requires overall systems approaches; dropping an algorithm
> in some low-level code is not sufficient for most kinds of attacks you want
> to defend against)

very true

/Joe

> Sincerely,
> jw
> --
> Americans might object: there is no way we would sacrifice our living
> standards for the benefit of people in the rest of the world. Nevertheless,
> whether we get there willingly or not, we shall soon have lower consumption
> rates, because our present rates are unsustainable.
>
>
>
> On Sun, Oct 30, 2011 at 9:58 AM, Kristen Eisenberg
> <kristen.eisenberg@REDACTED> wrote:
>>
>> This is a bit more of a general question than Erlang specific but I hope
>> someone here can answer this, or simply point me to a place where it has
>> already been answered.
>> I'm writing a server in which I will be storing encrypted user data
>> (unlike Sony). My problem is probably a product of zero experience with
>> encryption combined with a lack of sleep, but I can't figure out how to do
>> this securely. By that I mean I understand how to use crypto to
>> encrypt/decrypt a piece of data but the Key and the Ivec have to be the same
>> for both the encryption and decryption otherwise it doesn't work...so how do
>> I make this happen without storing those two things "out in the open?" It
>> seems like that can't be the optimal solution since anyone who could just
>> grab those and decrypt the data. Am I missing something completely obvious?
>> Chris Hicks.
>> Kristen Eisenberg
>> Billige Flüge
>> Marketing GmbH
>> Emanuelstr. 3,
>> 10317 Berlin
>> Deutschland
>> Telefon: +49 (33)
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>> gmail.com
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>> http://flug.airego.de - Billige Flüge vergleichen
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