cryptography Cryptography, or cryptology (from "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or ''-logy, -logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of Adversary (cryptography), ...

, key whitening is a technique intended to increase the security of an iterated block cipher. It consists of steps that combine the data with portions of the key.

Details

The most common form of key whitening is xor–encrypt–xor using a simple

XOR Exclusive or, exclusive disjunction, exclusive alternation, logical non-equivalence, or logical inequality is a logical operator whose negation is the logical biconditional. With two inputs, XOR is true if and only if the inputs differ (one ...

before the first round and after the last round of

encryption In Cryptography law, cryptography, encryption (more specifically, Code, encoding) is the process of transforming information in a way that, ideally, only authorized parties can decode. This process converts the original representation of the inf ...

. The first block cipher to use a form of key whitening is DES-X, which simply uses two extra 64-bit keys for whitening, beyond the normal 56-bit key of DES. This is intended to increase the complexity of a

brute-force attack In cryptography, a brute-force attack or exhaustive key search is a cryptanalytic attack that consists of an attacker submitting many possible keys or passwords with the hope of eventually guessing correctly. This strategy can theoretically be ...

, increasing the effective size of the key without major changes in the algorithm. DES-X's inventor,

Ron Rivest Ronald Linn Rivest (; born May 6, 1947) is an American cryptographer and computer scientist whose work has spanned the fields of algorithms and combinatorics, cryptography, machine learning, and election integrity. He is an Institute Profess ...

, named the technique ''whitening''. The cipher FEAL (followed by

Khufu and Khafre In cryptography, Khufu and Khafre are two block ciphers designed by Ralph Merkle in 1989 while working at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center. Along with Snefru, a cryptographic hash function, the ciphers were named after the Egyptian Pharaohs Kh ...

) introduced the practice of key whitening using portions of the same key used in the rest of the cipher. This offers no additional protection from brute-force attacks, but it can make other attacks more difficult. In a

Feistel cipher In cryptography, a Feistel cipher (also known as Luby–Rackoff block cipher) is a symmetric structure used in the construction of block ciphers, named after the German-born physicist and cryptographer Horst Feistel, who did pioneering resear ...

or similar algorithm, key whitening can increase security by concealing the specific inputs to the first and last round functions. In particular, it is not susceptible to a

meet-in-the-middle attack The meet-in-the-middle attack (MITM), a known-plaintext attack, is a generic space–time tradeoff cryptographic attack against encryption schemes that rely on performing multiple encryption operations in sequence. The MITM attack is the primary ...

. This form of key whitening has been adopted as a feature of many later block ciphers, including AES,

MARS Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun. It is also known as the "Red Planet", because of its orange-red appearance. Mars is a desert-like rocky planet with a tenuous carbon dioxide () atmosphere. At the average surface level the atmosph ...

, RC6, and

Twofish In cryptography, Twofish is a symmetric key block cipher with a block size of 128 bits and key sizes up to 256 bits. It was one of the five finalists of the Advanced Encryption Standard contest, but it was not selected for standardization. Two ...

References

* {{Cryptography navbox , block Key management Block ciphers

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See also

References