Tag - ECIES

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2021-11-16

EKON 25 Slides

EKON 25 at Düsseldorf was a great conference (konference?).

At last, a physical gathering of Delphi developers, mostly from Germany, but also from Europe - and even some from USA! No more virtual meetings, which may trigger the well known 'Abstract Error' on modern pascal coders.
There were some happy FPC users too - as I am now. :)

I have published the slides of my conferences, mostly about mORMot 2.
By the way, I wish we would be able to release officially mORMot 2 in December, before Christmas. I think it starts to be stabilized and already known to be used on production. We expect no more breaking change in the next weeks.

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2021-02-22

OpenSSL 1.1.1 Support for mORMot 2

Why OpenSSL? OpenSSL is the reference library for cryptography and secure TLS/HTTPS communication. It is part of most Linux/BSD systems, and covers a lot of use cases and algorithms. Even if it had some vulnerabilities in the past, it has been audited and validated for business use. Some algorithms  […]

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2017-03-18

Application Locking using Asymmetric Encryption

A common feature request for professional software is to prevent abuse of published applications.
For licensing or security reasons, you may be requested to "lock" the execution of programs, maybe tools or services.

Our Open-Souce mORMot framework can leverage Asymmetric Cryptography to ensure that only allowed users could run some executables, optionally with dedicated settings, on a given computer.
It offers the first brick on which you may build your own system upon.

From the User point of view, he/she will transmit a user@host.public file, then receives a corresponding user@host.unlock file, which will unlock the application.
Pretty easy to understand - even if some complex asymmetric encryption is involved behind the scene.

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2016-10-18

Cheat Mode for Private Keys

In order to follow best practice, our .private key files are always protected by a password.  A random value with enough length and entropy is always proposed by the ECC tool when a key pair is generated, and could be used directly.
It is always preferred to trust a computer to create true randomness (and SynCrypto.pas's secure TAESPRNG was designed to be the best possible seed, using hardware entropy if available), than using our human brain, which could be defeated by dictionary-based password attacks.
Brute force cracking would be almost impossible, since PBKDF2_HMAC_SHA256 Password-Based Key Derivation Function with 60,000 rounds is used, so rainbow tables (i.e. pre-computed passwords list) will be inoperative, and each password trial would take more time than with a regular Key Derivation Function.

The issue with strong passwords is that they are difficult to remember. If you use not pure random passwords, but some easier to remember values with good entropy, you may try some tools like https://xkpasswd.net/s which returns values like $$19*wrong*DRIVE*read*61$$.
But even then, you will be able to remember only a dozen of such passwords. In a typical public key infrastructure, you may create hundredths of keys, so remembering all passwords is no option for an average human being as (you and) me.

At the end, you end up with using a tool to store all your passwords (last trend is to use an online service with browser integration), or - admit it - store them in an Excel document protected by a password. Most IT people - and even security specialists - end with using such a mean of storage, just because they need it.
The weaknesses of such solutions can be listed:

  • How could we trust closed source software and third-party online services?
  • Even open source like http://keepass.info/help/base/security.html may appear weak (no PBKDF, no AFSplit, managed C#, SHA as PRNG);
  • The storage is as safe as the "master password" is safe;
  • If the "master password" is compromised, all your passwords are published;
  • You need to know the master password to add a new item to the store.

The ECC tool is able to work in "cheat mode", storing all .private key files generated passwords in an associated .cheat local file, encrypted using a cheat.public key.

As a result:

  • Each key pair will have its own associated .cheat file, so you only unleash one key at a time;
  • The .cheat file content is meaningless without the cheat.private key and its master password, so you can manage and store them together with your .private files;
  • Only the cheat.public key is needed when creating a key pair, so you won't leak your master password, and even could generate keys in an automated way, on a distant server;
  • The cheat.private key will be safely stored in a separated place, only needed when you need to recover a password;
  • It uses strong File Encryption, with proven PBKDF, AFSplit, AES-PRNG, and ECDH/ECIES algorithms.

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2016-09-24

Public-key Asymmetric Cryptography via SynECC

After weeks of implementation and testing, we introduce today a new feature of our mORMot Open-Source Framework.

Asymmetric encryption, also known as public-key cryptography, uses pairs of keys:

  • Public keys that may be disseminated widely;
  • Paired with private keys which are known only to the owner.

The framework SynEcc unit features a full asymmetric encryption system, based on Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), which may be used at application level (i.e. to protect your application data, by signing or encrypting it), or at transmission level (to enhance communication safety).
A full set of high-level features, including certificates and command line tool, offers a stand-alone but complete public-key infrastructure (PKI).

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