NCSAM/2011–Post 19–Is it safe to give out my keys?
There are some people who seem to get this right away, and others to whom I seem to have been explaining this concept for years. [And you know who you are, if you’re reading this!]
Whenever you talk about keys used for encryption, you have to figure out how you’re going to keep those keys, and whether or not you need to protect them.
And the answer depends (doesn’t everything?) – and depends on what kind of encryption algorithm you are using.
Let’s start with the easy kind, the one we’re all familiar with.
Symmetric (aka shared-key) cryptography
This is the sort of code that I’m sure we all played with as children. The oh-so-secret code (well, we didn’t know about frequency counting or cryptanalysis back then), where you and your best friend knew the secret code and the secret key. [Probably a Caesar cipher, although I used a Vigenere cipher, myself]
Well, those codes, like us, have grown up. The category of shared-key cryptography, also known as symmetric cryptography, so that the same keys (and sometimes the same operations) are used to encrypt and decrypt the data, has been enhanced hugely since those old and simple ciphers.
Now we have AES to contend with, and for all practical purposes, with reasonable keys, it’s unbreakable in usable time. [But if you have a spare universe to exhaust, perhaps you can crack my files]
For symmetric key cryptography, you do have to give out your key – to the party with whom you plan to exchange data. Of course, you have to protect this key as if it was as important as the data it protects, because it is all that protects your data. [Your attacker can tell what algorithm you use, and if you develop your own algorithm, well, they can tell what that is, too, because crypto algorithm inventors are generally doomed to fail to recognise the flaws in their own algorithm.]
That’s kind of a catch-22 situation – there’s really no way using cryptography to protect a key-sized piece of data outside of encrypting it with another key.
Asymmetric (aka public key) cryptography
That’s why the British had to invent public key cryptography.
Of course, unlike the Americans, the British managed to keep this a secret – so much so that to this day, many Americans believe their country invented public key cryptography (along with apple pie, mothers and speaking English loudly to foreigners).
With public key cryptography, there are two keys for every cryptographic operation – the public key, and the private key.
Here’s the tricky part
OK, I don’t think this part is very tricky, but there are several people I’ve had to explain this to over and over again, so I’ll try to take it really slowly.
Of the two keys, there is one key that you are supposed to share with anyone and everyone. To some of you it may come as a surprise that this is the PUBLIC key.
Again, the PUBLIC key is something you can share with anyone and everyone with no known danger to date. You can print it on billboards, put it on your business cards, include it in your email, really you can do anything with it that distributes it to anyone who might want it.
In a pinch, you might want to make sure that you distribute the public key in a way that allows the recipients to associate it with their opinion of your identity.
But the PRIVATE key – no, no, no, no, no, you do not ever distribute that. You don’t even let someone else create it for you. You generate your private key for yourself, and you don’t ever tell it to anyone.
The simple reason is that anyone who has your private key can pretend to be you – in fact, for cryptographic purposes, they are you.
So, really simply now:
- You generate your own keys. Nobody else ever does this for you (otherwise they aren’t your keys)
- The public key can be given to anyone, but has to be associated with your identity in the recipient’s mind.
- The private key cannot be given to anyone. It must be held by you, and you alone.
If you think this is confusing, apparently you are right – even Microsoft’s official curriculum for the Windows Server 2003 training courses says that “Alice encrypts the message using Bob’s private key” – if Alice has Bob’s private key, she can exchange any secret message with Bob while they are in bed together that night.
Actually, scratch that – even my wife doesn’t have access to my private key, and I don’t have access to hers.
What do you do with these two keys?
There are two operations that you can do with your private key. You can decrypt data, and you can sign data.
Reversing this, there are two operations that you can do with a public key – that would be someone else’s public key, not yours. You can encrypt data, and you can verify a signature.
Hybrid cryptography
In many cryptographic exchanges, such as SSL / TLS, and other modern equivalents, asymmetric cryptography is used briefly at the start of each session, so that two parties can identify each other and exchange (or, more commonly, derive) a shared key. This shared key is then used to encrypt the subsequent communications for some time using symmetric key cryptography.
A quick summary
For shared-key (aka symmetric) cryptography, you do have to share your keys – but you share them secretly with only the person to whom you are communicating. If you are trying to protect a communication between you and a partner, you cannot send the keys down the same line that you are going to send the communication down, because an attacker who can steal your communication can also steal your keys.
For asymmetric cryptography, you also have to share your keys – but only your public keys. Again, that’s only your public keys that you share. And you have to share those public keys. Your private keys are used by the various applications that encrypt data on your behalf, or to sign data to prove it came from you. Anything outside of that realm that asks you for your private keys is not to be trusted.
Any questions?
Ask an expert if you still have concerns. Because if you give out your private keys, then you have to generate new ones, and distribute new public keys.