Introduction:

Encryption is a technique for transforming information on a computer in such a way that it

becomes unreadable. So, even if someone is able to gain access to a computer with personal
data on it, they likely won’t be able to do anything with the data unless they have complicated,
expensive software or the original data key.

The basic function of encryption is essentially to translate normal text into ciphertext.
Encryption can help ensure that data doesn’t get read by the wrong people, but can also ensure
that data isn’t altered in transit, and verify the identity of the sender.

Algorithms:

DES:

History:

DES was the result of a research project set up by International Business Machines (IBM)
corporation in the late 1960’s which resulted in a cipher known as LUCIFER. In the early 1970’s
it was decided to commercialise LUCIFER and a number of significant changes were introduced.
IBM was not the only one involved in these changes as they sought technical advice from the
National Security Agency (NSA) (other outside consultants were involved but it is likely that the
NSA were the major contributors from a technical point of view). The altered version of
LUCIFER was put forward as a proposal for the new national encryption standard requested by
the National Bureau of Standards (NBS). It was finally adopted in 1977 as the Data Encryption
Standard - DES (FIPS PUB 46).

Some of the changes made to LUCIFER have been the subject of much controversy even to the
present day. The most notable of these was the key size. LUCIFER used a key size of 128 bits
however this was reduced to 56 bits for DES. Even though DES actually accepts a 64 bit key as
input, the remaining eight bits are used for parity checking and have no effect on DES’s security.
Outsiders were convinced that the 56 bit key was an easy target for a brute force attack due to
its extremely small size. The need for the parity checking scheme was also questioned without
satisfying answers

Another controversial issue was that the S-boxes used were designed under classified
conditions and no reasons for their particular design were ever given. This led people to assume
that the NSA had introduced a “trapdoor” through which they could decrypt any data
encrypted by DES even without knowledge of the key. One startling discovery was that the S-
boxes appeared to be secure against an attack known as Differential Cryptanalysis which was
only publicly discovered by Biham and Shamir in 1990. This suggests that the NSA were aware
of this attack in 1977; 13 years earlier! In fact the DES designers claimed that the reason they
never made the design specifications for the S-boxes available was that they knew about a
number of attacks that weren’t public.knowledge at the time and they didn’t want them leaking
- this is quite a plausible claim as differential cryptanalysis has shown. However, despite all this
controversy, in 1994 NIST reformed DES for government use for a further five years for use in
areas other than “classifed”.

Methodology:
Encryption of a block of the message takes place in 16 stages or rounds. From the input key,
sixteen 48 bit keys are generated, one for each round. In each round, eight so-called S-boxes
are used. These S-boxes are fixed in the specification of the standard. Using the S-boxes, groups
of six bits are mapped to groups of four bits. The contents of these S-boxes has been
determined by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). The S-boxes appear to be randomly
filled, but this is not the case. Recently it has been discovered that these S-boxes, determined in
the 1970s, are resistant against an attack called differential cryptanalysis which was first known
in the 1990s.

The block of the message is divided into two halves. The right half is expanded from 32 to 48
bits using another fixed table. The result is combined with the subkey for that round using the
XOR operation. Using the S-boxes the 48 resulting bits are then transformed again to 32 bits,
which are subsequently permutated again using yet another fixed table. This by now thoroughly
shuffled right half is now combined with the left half using the XOR operation. In the next
round, this combination is used as the new left half.
The figure should hopefully make this process a bit more clear. In the figure, the left and right
halves are denotes as L0 and R0, and in subsequent rounds as L1, R1, L2, R2 and so on. The
function f is responsible for all the mappings described above.

Security of DES
This secret key encryption algorithm uses a key that is 56 bits, or seven characters long. At the
time it was believed that trying out all 72,057,594,037,927,936 possible keys (a seven with 16
zeros) would be impossible because computers could not possibly ever become fast enough. In
1998 the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) built a special-purpose machine that could
decrypt a message by trying out all possible keys in less than three days. The machine cost less
than $250,000 and searched over 88 billion keys per second.
Triple-DES
The Triple-DES variant was developed after it became clear that DES by itself was too easy to
crack. It uses three 56-bit DES keys, giving a total key length of 168 bits. Encryption using Triple-
DES is simply

1. encryption using DES with the first 56-bit key

2. decryption using DES with the second 56-bit key

3. encryption using DES with the third 56-bit key

Because Triple-DES applies the DES algorithm three times (hence the name), Triple-DES takes
three times as long as standard DES. Decryption using Triple-DES is the same as the encryption,
except it is executed in reverse.

RSA:
Introduction
A public-key cryptosystem is one in which each user places an encryption procedure E into a
public file. Each user has a corresponding decryption procedure D, the details of which the user
does not reveal to anyone 1 else.

The key to ensuring the security of a public-key cryptosystem is for it to be extremely difficult
to derive the decryption key from the publicly available encryption key. In order to qualify as a
public-key cryptosystem, the encryption and decryption procedures must have the following
properties:

1. Applying the decryption procedure to a message encrypted by the corresponding

encryption procedure yields the original message. This can be expressed formally as,
D(E(M)) = M.

2. Both the encryption procedures and the decryption procedures are easy to compute.

3. Publicly revealing the encryption method E does not reveal any easy way to compute the
corresponding decryption procedure D.

4. If a message M is first deciphered using the decryption procedure D and then the result is
encrypted using the corresponding encryption procedure E, the final result gives the original
message. Formally we write this as,
 E(D(M)) = M.

Typically, an encryption (or decryption) procedure E consist of an encryption key and a general
method for enciphering a message M using the key. The enciphered message is called the
ciphertext C. In a public-key cryptosystem, everyone can use the same method for enciphering
the message because the security of any given encryption procedure relies on the security of
the decryption key. An encryption function which satisfies the first three properties given above
is called a trap-door one-way function. Diffie and Hellman, who first introduced the concept,
define a trap-door one-way function as function whose inverse, though it exists, is
computationally infeasible to compute when given only the original function [3]. Though Diffie
and Hellman were the first to introduce the idea of public-key cryptography and of trap-door
one-way functions, the true emergence of public-key cryptography did not come until the
introduction of the RSA algorithm.

The RSA Algorithm: A Realization of Public-Key Cryptography

The RSA algorithm, introduced in 1977 by Rivest, Shamir, and Adlemen, is an algorithm for
public-key cryptography. RSA was the first and is still the most widely-used algorithm for public
key cryptography and it is used for thousands of applications from e-mail encryption to secure
online purchasing. It was the first cryptosystem to enable senders to “sign” each message they
send so that the recipient has proof of who sent the message.

To encrypt a message using the RSA algorithm, given a public encryption key (e, n), the general
method of the encryption procedure is as follows:

The first step is to represent the message as an integer between 0 and n − 1, M, using any
standard representation.Then, to encrypt the message, raise M to the eth power modulo n. The
ciphertext C is thus given by,

C ≡ E(M) ≡ Me (mod n).

To decrypt the message, we raise it to a different power, d, part of the private decryption key
(d, n), modulo n. We can represent the decryption procedure as

D(C) ≡ C d (mod n).

In the RSA algorithm, the encryption key is the pair of positive integers (e, n) and the
decryption key is the pair of positive numbers (d, n). Each user makes the encryption key public,
keeping the corresponding decryption key private. To choose the encryption and decryption
keys for the RSA algorithm, we first compute n as the product of two very large, random primes
p and q. We then choose d to be a large 3 integer that is relatively prime to (p − 1)(q − 1). That
is, choose d such that it satisfies

gcd(d,(p − 1)(q − 1)) = 1.

Finally, we choose the value of e such that it satisfies the equation

e · d ≡ 1 (mod (p − 1)(q − 1)).

In addition to allowing secure encryption of messages, the RSA method of encryption also
allows messages to be “signed” by the person sending the message so that the recipient has
proof that the message came from the sender and not simply from someone claiming to be the
sender.

References :

http://www.umsl.edu/~siegelj/information_theory/projects/des.netau.net/des%20history.html

http://www.iusmentis.com/technology/encryption/des/

https://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/10/mkelly1/rsa.pdf