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I passed CompTIA Security+ but that wasn't enough to let me answer this question from the blog post. Is this sentence describing the traditional way? > A key t
by Noumenon72 2y ago
I passed CompTIA Security+ but that wasn't enough to let me answer this question from the blog post. Is this sentence describing the traditional way?
> A key transport protocol is similar to a key exchange algorithm in that the sender, Alice, generates a random symmetric key and then encrypts it under the receiver’s public key. Upon successful decryption, both parties then share this secret key.
Isn't the following just describing how everyday PKE works?
> The general paradigm here is called "hybrid public-key encryption" because it combines a non-interactive key exchange based on public-key cryptography for establishing a shared secret, and a symmetric encryption scheme for the actual encryption.
It feels like the blog post is not principally concerned with explaining the benefits of HPKE, because everyone is already using it, but rather just proposing a standard for the many ways people are doing it.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- skissane 2y agoThe point is: if you are combining asymmetric and symmetric encryption primitives by hand, there are lots of different ways to do it, and it is easy to make the wrong choices and introduce security weaknesses as a result. So the idea is you should give developers a precooked solution that already does that. And that exists - e.g. in NaCl and libsodium, and BouncyCastle has some similar Java APIs. The problem is that different libraries do it in mutually incompatible ways. So the point of HPKE is to define a standard way of doing that which any library can implement, so if one end of the communication wants to use libsodium in C or C++ and the other end wants to use BouncyCastle in Java, it will just work (once the respective libraries implement HPKE, etc)
- tptacek 2y agoI don't think anyone has any illusions that WireGuard is going to adopt this. :)
- skissane 2y agoWireGuard is something sufficiently high profile that if there is a weakness it is likely to be found. The real benefit of this is the long tail of obscure applications whose weaknesses no one is looking at - until eventually, some bad actor does.
- _zoltan_ 2y agoDoes that certificate cover advanced cryptography?