Security through obscurity meaning software#
Security through obscurity meaning password#
Security through obscurity meaning Offline#

In addition, it can also provide integrity protection of data at rest to detect malicious tampering. Data on a removable disk or in a database can be encrypted to prevent disclosure of sensitive data should the physical media be lost or stolen. It can also be used to protect data at rest.

Security through obscurity meaning password#

For example, are you sending your online banking password to your bank or someone else? Authenticity protections provide assurance that users are actually communicating with the systems as intended. The confidentiality and integrity protections offered by cryptographic protocols such as SSL/TLS can protect communications from malicious eavesdropping and tampering.

Active attacks involve an attacker impersonating a client or server, intercepting communications in transit, and viewing and/or modifying the contents before passing them on to their intended destination (or dropping them entirely).

Security through obscurity meaning Offline#

Passive attacks may be online (in which an attacker reads traffic in real-time) or offline (in which an attacker simply captures traffic in real-time and views it later-perhaps after spending some time decrypting it). Passive attacks involve an attacker simply listening on a network segment and attempting to read sensitive information as it travels. There are two main types of attacks that an adversary may attempt to carry out on a network. It can protect communications that traverse untrusted networks. Communication occurs over open, public networks such as the Internet, or private networks which may be compromised by external attackers or malicious insiders. These client/server communications take place over networks that cannot be trusted.

Security through obscurity meaning software#

Software systems often have multiple endpoints, typically multiple clients, and one or more back-end servers. It can also authenticate senders and recipients to one another and protect against repudiation. Cryptography can ensure the confidentiality and integrity of both data in transit as well as data at rest. When used correctly, crypto helps to provide these assurances. For digital signatures, asymmetric crypto is generally used to encrypt the hashes of messages rather than entire messages.Ī cryptosystem provides for managing cryptographic keys including generation, exchange, storage, use, revocation, and replacement of the keys.Ī secure system should provide several assurances such as confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data as well as authenticity and non-repudiation. Thus, asymmetric crypto is generally used to encrypt symmetric encryption keys which are then used to encrypt much larger blocks of data. Asymmetric is much slower and can only encrypt pieces of data that are smaller than the key size (typically 2048 bits or smaller).

Symmetric is generally very fast and ideal for encrypting large amounts of data (e.g., an entire disk partition or database). Similarly, Jane could digitally sign a message with her private key, and anyone with Jane’s public key could decrypt the signed message and verify that it was in fact Jane who sent it. Any data encrypted with a private key can only be decrypted with the corresponding public key. Only John can decrypt the message, as only John has his private key. So, sending a message to John requires encrypting that message with John’s public key. The private key is kept secret at all times, but the public key may be freely distributed.ĭata encrypted with a public key may only be decrypted with the corresponding private key. Every user in an asymmetric cryptosystem has both a public key and a private key. With asymmetric crypto, two different keys are used for encryption and decryption.

Key distribution is a tricky problem and was the impetus for developing asymmetric cryptography. A sender and a recipient must already have a shared key that is known to both. With symmetric cryptography, the same key is used for both encryption and decryption.