Question

I was reading a tutorial on how to salt a key to make your encryption secure, but couldn’t make much of it. I don’t know a lot about cryptography, and need some help. I am using commoncrypto to encrypt files, and am done, except for the fact that it isn’t secure…

This is what I have:

- (NSData *)AES256EncryptWithKey:(NSString *)key
{
   // 'key' should be 32 bytes for AES256, will be null-padded otherwise
   char keyPtr[kCCKeySizeAES256 + 1]; // room for terminator (unused)
   bzero( keyPtr, sizeof( keyPtr ) ); // fill with zeroes (for padding)

    NSLog(@"You are encrypting something...");

   // fetch key data
   [key getCString:keyPtr maxLength:sizeof( keyPtr ) encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];

   NSUInteger dataLength = [self length];

   //See the doc: For block ciphers, the output size will always be less than or 
   //equal to the input size plus the size of one block.
   //That's why we need to add the size of one block here
   size_t bufferSize = dataLength + kCCBlockSizeAES128;
   void *buffer = malloc( bufferSize );

   size_t numBytesEncrypted = 0;
   CCCryptorStatus cryptStatus = CCCrypt( kCCEncrypt, kCCAlgorithmAES128,     kCCOptionPKCS7Padding,
                                      keyPtr, kCCKeySizeAES256,
                                      NULL /* initialization vector (optional) */,
                                      [self bytes], dataLength, /* input */
                                      buffer, bufferSize, /* output */
                                      &numBytesEncrypted );
   if( cryptStatus == kCCSuccess )
   {
      //the returned NSData takes ownership of the buffer and will free it on deallocation
  return [NSData dataWithBytesNoCopy:buffer length:numBytesEncrypted];

   }

   free( buffer ); //free the buffer
   return nil;
}

If someone can help me out, and show me exactly how I would implement salt, that would be great! Thanks again!

Answer 1

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Enciphering text

AKA jumbling it around, to try and make it indecipherable. This is the game you play in cryptography. To do this, you use deterministic functions.

Encrypting involves using a function which takes two parameters: usually a short, fixed length one, and an arbitrary length one. It produces output the same size as the second parameter.

We call the first parameter the key; the second, the plaintext; and the output, the ciphertext.

This will have an inverse function (which is sometimes the same one), which has the same signature, but given instead ciphertext will return the plaintext (when using the same key).

Obviously the property of a good encryption function is that the plaintext is not easily determinable from the ciphertext, without knowing the key. An even better one will produce ciphertext that is indistinguishable from random noise.

Hashing involves a function which takes one parameter, of arbitrary size, and returns an output of fixed size. Here, the goal is that given a particular output, it should be hard to find any input that will produce it. It is a one-way function, so it has no inverse. Again, it’s awesome if the output looks completely random.

The problem with determinism

The above is all very well and good, but we have a problem with our ultimate goals of indecipherability when designing implementations of these functions: they’re deterministic! That’s no good for producing random output.

While we can design functions that still produce very random-looking output, thanks to confusion and diffusion, they’re still going to give the same output given the same input. We both need this, and don’t like it. We would never be able to decipher anything with a non-deterministic crypto system, but we don’t like repeatable results! Repeatable means analysable… determinable (huh.). We don’t want the enemy to see the same two ciphertexts and know that they came from the same input, that would be giving them information (and useful techniques for breaking crypto-systems, like rainbow tables). How do we solve this problem?

Enter: some random stuff inserted at the start.

That’s how we defeat it! We prepend (or sometimes better, append), some unique random input with our actual input, everytime we use our functions. This makes our deterministic functions give different output even when we give the same input. We send the unique random input (when hashing, called a salt; when encrypting, called an Initialisation Vector, or IV) along with the ciphertext. It’s not important whether the enemy sees this random input; our real input is already protected by our key (or the one-way hash). All that we were actually worried about is that our output is different all the time, so that it’s non-analysable; and we’ve achieved this.

How do I apply this knowledge?

OK. So everybody has their app, and within it their cryptosystem protecting parts of the app.

Now we don’t want to go reinventing the wheel with cryptosystems (Worst. Idea. Ever.), so some really knowledgable people have already come up with good components that can build any system (i.e, AES, RSA, SHA2, HMAC, PBKDF2). But if everyone is using the same components, then that still introduces some repeatability! Fortunately, if everyone uses different keys, and unique initial random inputs, in their own cryptosytem, they should be fine.

Enough already! Talk about implementation!

Let’s talk about your example. You’re wanting to do some simple encryption. What do we want for that? Well, A) we want a good random key, and B) we want a good random IV. This will make our ciphertext as secure as it can get. I can see you haven’t supplied a random IV – it’s better practice to do so. Get some bytes from a [secure/crypto]-random source, and chuck it in. You store/send those bytes along with the ciphertext. Yes, this does mean that the ciphertext is a constant length bigger than the plaintext, but it’s a small price to pay.

Now what about that key? Sometimes we want a remember-able key (like.. a password), rather than a nice random one that computers like (if you have the option to just use a random key – do that instead). Can we get a compromise? Yes! Should we translate ASCII character passwords into bytes to make the key? HELL NO!

ASCII characters aren’t very random at all (heck, they generally only use about 6-7 bits out of 8). If anything, what we want to do is make our key at least look random. How do we do this? Well, hashing happens to be good for this. What if we want to reuse our key? We’ll get the same hash… repeatability again!

Luckily, we use the other form of unique random input – a salt. Make a unique random salt, and append that to your key. Then hash it. Then use the bytes to encrypt your data. Add the salt AND the IV along with your ciphertext when you send it, and you should be able to decrypt on the end.

Almost done? NO! You see the hashing solution I described in the paragraph above? Real cryptographers would call it amateurish. Would you trust a system which is amateurish? No! Am I going to discuss why it’s amateurish? No, ‘cus you don’t need to know. Basically, it’s just not REALLY-SUPER-SCRAMBLED enough for their liking.

What you need to know is that they’ve already devised a better system for this very problem. It’s called PBKDF2. Find an implementation of it, and [learn to] use that instead.

Now all your data is secure.