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In cryptography, a shared secret is a piece of data, known only to the parties involved, in a secure communication. This usually refers to the key of a symmetric cryptosystem . The shared secret can be a PIN code , a password , a passphrase , a big number, or an array of randomly chosen bytes.
These two values are chosen in this way to ensure that the resulting shared secret can take on any value from 1 to p–1. Here is an example of the protocol, with non-secret values in blue, and secret values in red. Alice and Bob publicly agree to use a modulus p = 23 and base g = 5 (which is a primitive root modulo 23).
The shared secret can be used, for instance, as the key for a symmetric cipher. If the sender and receiver wish to exchange encrypted messages, each must be equipped to encrypt messages to be sent and decrypt messages received. The nature of the equipping they require depends on the encryption technique they might use. If they use a code, both ...
Symmetric-key encryption can use either stream ciphers or block ciphers. [8] Stream ciphers encrypt the digits (typically bytes), or letters (in substitution ciphers) of a message one at a time. An example is ChaCha20. Substitution ciphers are well-known ciphers, but can be easily decrypted using a frequency table. [9]
[1] [2] [3] This shared secret may be directly used as a key, or to derive another key. The key, or the derived key, can then be used to encrypt subsequent communications using a symmetric-key cipher. It is a variant of the Diffie–Hellman protocol using elliptic-curve cryptography.
The shared secret can be used, for instance, as the key for a symmetric cipher, which will be, in essentially all cases, much faster. In an asymmetric key encryption scheme, anyone can encrypt messages using a public key, but only the holder of the paired private key can decrypt such a message.
Example of a Key Derivation Function chain as used in the Signal Protocol.The output of one KDF function is the input to the next KDF function in the chain. In cryptography, a key derivation function (KDF) is a cryptographic algorithm that derives one or more secret keys from a secret value such as a master key, a password, or a passphrase using a pseudorandom function (which typically uses a ...
Ciphers are commonly used to encrypt written information. Codes operated by substituting according to a large codebook which linked a random string of characters or numbers to a word or phrase. For example, "UQJHSE" could be the code for "Proceed to the following coordinates." When using a cipher the original information is known as plaintext ...