Blurry Box Encryption Scheme and Why it Matters to Industrial IoT
standards while safeguarding digital intellectual property against counterfeiting and reverse engineering .
The impact on smart factories would be particularly dramatic . Sensitive data can include production data in many forms and sizes , such as 3D blueprints or punch schemes for embroidery machines , or the technology data or configurations used in manufacturing processes . This invaluable data needs to be protected against know-how theft , counterfeiting , and tampering , otherwise software-as-a-service will easily degrade into piracy-as-a-service . Applying Kerckhoffs ’ Principle would provide encryption methods associated with hardware anchors of trust and ensure IP confidentiality and the integrity and authenticity of digital signatures .
2.2 MODERN CRYPTOGRAPHY
Today , cryptography is based on a systematic approach of defining and proving security properties of systems . Two steps are needed to define a system ’ s security :
1 . The security property has to be described precisely , and 2 . There must be as few restrictions placed on the attacker as possible .
For example , it is not safe to assume that the attacker only has access to encrypted ciphertext . Instead , he might have pairs of ciphertext and plaintext . This is called a known-plaintext attack . Even less restrictive is the assumption that the attacker can choose either ciphertexts or plaintexts and learn the corresponding counterpart by , for example , interacting with its sender or receiver . A well-known example is the Enigma machine , which violated Kerckhoffs ’ Principle . The internal wiring of the rotors was the secret . Only few rotors were used , and breaking Enigma became feasible after capturing one machine . Furthermore , the cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park broke Enigma with a known-plaintext attack because they were able to guess message parts correctly . This was not disclosed to the public until 1974 . Throughout the war , the Germans were confident that Enigma had not been broken .
Today ’ s cryptography is not only about keeping messages private . The field has broadened its purview . A major step in this direction was the introduction of public key cryptography . This is a different kind of message encryption , where different keys are used for encryption and decryption . Several other primitive approaches such as digital signatures , key exchanges , and commitment schemes have been designed and are used in more complex systems , such as voting schemes , online banking , crypto currencies or general secure multi-party computation .
2.3 PROVABLE SECURITY
For many schemes using algebraic structures , such as public key encryption and digital signatures , security is not mere conjecture , but proven mathematically . This is not absolute proof of security , but it is based on a problem that is considered hard to solve . Finding the prime factors of a large number is one such problem , used for example in the Rabin and the well-known , closely related
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