Are there...

l.crypto at stewart.org l.crypto at stewart.org
Mon Nov 17 09:45:10 EST 2003


(this is a resend, apologies for duplicates)

As David Wagner points out, encryption with a public key (for which the
private key has been discarded) would seem to work.

I think there is a bit more to be said about requirements though.

For a one-way encryption algorithm to be injective will also require that
the output (nee ciphertext) be at least as long as the input, so unlike
a hash function, you can't have a fixed length output for a variable length
input (unless the fixed length is larger than the largest input.)

One can always invert an injective one-way function by
exhaustive search, but do you have a requirement for how difficult
it must be to discover the inverse function?  If, for example, a public
key encryption is used, with the private key thrown away, then we might
estimate the work involved in cracking the system.
If you want the exhaustive search to be the easiest way to solve the
system, then the effective key length of the public key must be at least
as large as the message.

If the system is to be used for password encoding (as is traditional) then
one should also protect against dictionary attacks (precomputation of
likely passwords).  The usual way to do that is with salt, but if you
also wish to avoid someone cracking the whole system, then the
encryption key should be generated independently for each encryption
and packaged along with the ciphertext. That solves the salt problem
and the cracking the system problem in one step.

-Larry



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