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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.
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.
IDEA is a minor revision of an earlier cipher, the Proposed Encryption Standard (PES). The cipher was designed under a research contract with the Hasler Foundation, which became part of Ascom-Tech AG. The cipher was patented in a number of countries but was freely available for non-commercial use. The name "IDEA" is also a trademark.
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.
For example, a replacement for WEP, Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA), uses three levels of keys: master key, working key and RC4 key. The master WPA key is shared with each client and access point and is used in a protocol called Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) to create new working keys frequently enough to thwart known attack methods. The ...
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 ...
Shamir's secret sharing (SSS) is an efficient secret sharing algorithm for distributing private information (the "secret") among a group. The secret cannot be revealed unless a quorum of the group acts together to pool their knowledge. To achieve this, the secret is mathematically divided into parts (the "shares") from which the secret can be ...