Search

Home > Cryptography FM > Episode 10: Exploiting Authenticated Encryption Key Commitment!
Podcast: Cryptography FM
Episode:

Episode 10: Exploiting Authenticated Encryption Key Commitment!

Category: Science & Medicine
Duration: 00:46:34
Publish Date: 2020-12-01 15:00:00
Description:

Authenticated encryption such as AES-GCM or ChaCha20-Poly1305 is used in a wide variety of applications, including potentially in settings for which it was not originally designed. A question given relatively little attention is whether an authenticated encryption scheme guarantees “key commitment”: the notion that ciphertext should decrypt to a valid plaintext only under the key that was used to generate the ciphertext.

In reality, however, protocols and applications do rely on key commitment. A new paper by engineers at Google, the University of Haifa and Amazon demonstrates three recent applications where missing key commitment is exploitable in practice. They construct AES-GCM ciphertext which can be decrypted to two plaintexts valid under a wide variety of file formats, such as PDF, Windows executables, and DICOM; and the results may shock you.

Links and papers discussed in the show:

Music composed by Toby Fox and performed by Sean Schafianski.

Special Guests: Ange Albertini and Stefan Kölbl.

Sponsored By:

Total Play: 0