Tag: hybrid encryption

From KEMs to protocols

This is the third part of my series on Key Encapsulation Mechanisms (KEMs) and why you should care about them. Part 1 looked at what a KEM is and the KEM/DEM paradigm for constructing public key encryption schemes. Part 2 looked at cases where the basic KEM abstraction is not sufficient and showed how it can be extended to add support for multiple recipients and sender authentication. At the end of part 2, I promised to write a follow-up about tackling forward-secrecy and replay attacks in the KEM/DEM paradigm, so here it is. In this article we’ll go from simple one-way message encryption to a toy version of the Signal Protocol that provides forward secrecy and strong authentication of two (or more) parties.

WARNING: please pay attention to the word “toy” in the previous sentence. This is a blog post, not a thorough treatment of how to write a real end-to-end encrypted messaging protocol.

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Hybrid encryption and the KEM/DEM paradigm

If you know a bit about public key cryptography, you probably know that you don’t directly encrypt a message with a public key encryption algorithm like RSA. This is for many reasons, one of which being that it is incredibly slow. Instead you do what’s called hybrid encryption: first you generate a random AES key (*) and encrypt the message with that (using a suitable authenticated encryption mode), then you encrypt the AES key with the RSA public key. The recipient uses their RSA private key to decrypt the AES key and then uses that to decrypt the rest of the message. This is much faster than trying to encrypt a large message directly with RSA, so pretty much all sane implementations of RSA encryption do this.

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