Protection against offline dictionary attack on static files

[Adam Back]

Yes this is a good idea, and some people thought of it before also.  

Look for paper "secure applications of low entropy keys" or something
like that by Schnieir, Wagner et al.  (on counterpane labs page I
think).

Also the PBKDF2 function defined in PKCS#5 used to convert the
password into a key for unwrapping PKCS#12 uses the same idea.  The
general approach is called "key-stretching".

The approach usually involves some form of iterative hashing so
similar to what you proposed.

Adam

On Thu, Oct 23, 2003 at 08:20:35AM +0100, Arcane Jill wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> It's possible I may be reinventing the wheel here, so my apologies if 
> that's so, but it occurs to me that there's a defence against an offline 
> dictionary attack on an encrypted file. Here's what I mean: Say you have 
> a file, and you want to keep it secret. What do you do? Obviously you 
> either encrypt it directly, or you store it in an encrytped volume 
> (thereby encrypting it indirectly). Problem? Maybe an attacker can 
> somehow get hold of the encrypted file or volume ... maybe your laptop 
> gets stolen .... maybe other people have access to your machine. In 
> principle, you're protected by your passphrase, but if an attacker can 
> get hold of the file, they can try an offline dictionary attack to guess 
> your passphrase, so unless you're very good at inventing high entropy 
> passphrases /and remembering them without writing them down/, there may 
> still be a risk.
> 
> Here's the defence:
> 
> To encrypt a file:
>    Generate a random number R between 0 and M-1 (for some fixed M, a 
> power of 256)
>    Type in your passphrase P
>    Let S = R || P (where || stands for concatenation)
>    Let K = hash(S)
> K is now your encryption key. R is to be thrown away.
> 
> To decrypt the same file:
>    Generate a random number r between 0 and M-1
>    Type in your passphrase P
>    for (int i=r; ; i=(i+1)%M)
>    {
>        Let S = I || P
>        Let K = hash(S)
>        Try to decrypt using key K
>    }
> 
> This places a computational burden on your PC at decrypt-time. The 
> larger you choose M, the more CPU time it will take to figure out K. So, 
> you choose M such that it takes your PC about one second to find K, then 
> your attacker will experience the same burden - but multiplied a 
> squillionfold (a "squillion" being the entropy of your passphrase). This 
> means that even if your passphrase consists of just two words from a 
> dictionary, /and/ your attacker suspects this, it will still take him or 
> her over a hundred and fifty years to decrypt (assuming your attacker 
> has a PC of equivalent power). Even if your attacker has a faster PC 
> than you, it will still be relatively easy to pick a 
> strong-yet-memorable passphrase, since better tech can only ease the 
> attacker's problem, not remove it. All of a sudden, weak passphrases 
> turn into strong ones, and strong passphrases turn into computationally 
> infeasible ones.
> 
> Is this useful?
> Has anyone come up with it before? (Someone must have ... but I don't 
> recall seeing the technique used in applications)
> 
> Jill
> 
> 
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