RE: Signing before Encryption and Signing after Encryption
- From: "David Gillett" <gillettdavid@xxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 09:32:11 -0800
The property that a hash match is supposed to verify (is this
copy the same as the original) is not quite the same as the
property that a signature verifies (did this document come from
that source). There *are* many applications where one is an
acceptable alternative to the other.
However, there have been numerous news items in the last 18 months
about the feasibility of engineering hash collisions with several
popular algorithms; hashing must be assumed to provide weaker
verification of its property than might have been previously
assumed. (For now, I've recommended that folks using tools that
don't yet do SHA-256 or better should use *both* MD5 and SHA-1 --
I don't think anyone has yet described an engineered collision that
works with both.)
Engineering hash collisions is apparently easier than compromising
a properly-secured private key used in a good asymmetric algorithm.
David Gillett
-----Original Message-----
From: Craig Wright [mailto:cwright@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Tuesday, March 21, 2006 8:03 PM
To: gillettdavid@xxxxxxxx; shyaam@xxxxxxxxx;
security-basics@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: Signing before Encryption and Signing after Encryption
Hello,
Just to be difficult....
David stated "Signing requires a private key". This is
correct through feasibility, but it is not technically
correct as there are signature schemes that only require
symmetric keys. Signing with symmetric keys is a lot more
complex and thus more prone to error and has a range of key
management issues. This does not mean that it is not possible.
In fact there are scheme to sign a message using only Hashing
algorithms. The simplest of these is to hash the document and
keep a list of document hashes (similar to software). A user
could check the list to see if the message was valid or if
tampering had occurred. A third party could keep the hash
tables to ensure that the lists where accurate.
So signing does not require a private key - it just makes it easier.
Next it also depends on non-repudiation/repudiation issues.
It is easy to sign a document and have a verification that it
is unaltered but with no proof that the original signer could
not come back and accuse the receiver of forging the document.
An example symmetric scheme could be:
Alice encrypts a message using a symmetric key known to Bob (and Alice
only)
Alice hashes the encrypted message
Alice encrypts the (encrypted) message and hash using a
symmetric key known to Jim but unknown to Bob Bob receives
the hashed and encrypted message.
If Bob alters the message - the hash will not work. Alice can
not lie as Jim has a copy.
Key management is a bugger, but still possible (though unlikely)
ANSI X9.17 Notarised Symmetric Keys may be used to sign.
Regards
Craig S Wright
PS There are also hybrid ciphers for signing which are based
on a combination of all the above - but this for another post
-----Original Message-----
From: David Gillett [mailto:gillettdavid@xxxxxxxx]
Sent: 22 March 2006 6:21
To: shyaam@xxxxxxxxx; security-basics@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: Signing before Encryption and Signing after Encryption
Signing requires a private key -- therefore, it *must* be
Asymmetric.
Asymmetric is typically much slower than Symmetric, so you
get things like SSL that use Asymmetric to protect the
exchange of the Symmetric key used for actual payload encryption.
Signing after encryption allows the signature to be
verified before/without decrypting the payload. There are a
variety of circumstances in which that could be useful, which
are blocked if the signing is done first. I can't think of
any where the opposite is true.
David Gillett, CISSP
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