Cryptography Overview

would slow down the encryption and decryption operations. In addition, if the 20-round version of RC6 is accepted as submitted to the AES, a round count other than 20 rounds might not be AES.

AES

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) selected an alogorithm (Rijndael) as the replacement for the Data Encryption Standard (DES) in its Advanced Encryption Standard project. Crypto-C includes basic AES support.

Modes of Operation

When you use a block cipher to encrypt a message of arbitrary length, you can also choose a mode of operation.

Modes of operation can use techniques such as feedback or chaining to make identical plaintext blocks encrypt to different ciphertext blocks. Modes are designed so that they do not weaken the security of the underlying cipher, but they may have properties in addition to those inherent in the basic cipher.

Most of the modes of operation in Crypto-C are feedback modes. Feedback modes use the previous block of output to alter the current block of input before encrypting. In this way, encrypting the same block of plaintext twice will virtually never produce the same ciphertext.

A feedback algorithm requires an initialization vector, or IV, to alter the first block. The IV has no cryptographic significance. It is used to alter the first block of data before any encryption takes place; therefore, it does not need to be secret. It should be random, though, so that the first block of encrypted data is not predictable. In order to start the decryption process, it is necessary to use the IV that was employed in the encryption process.

Four Modes

Crypto-C offers the following four block cipher modes:

Electronic Codebook (ECB) mode

Cipher Block Chaining (CBC) mode

Cipher Feedback (CFB) mode

Output Feedback (OFB) mode

A brief description of these modes follows. Most cryptography texts, such as Bruce Schneier’s Applied Cryptography [15], provide full descriptions of the various modes.

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RSA Security 5.2.2 manual Modes of Operation, Four Modes