1. What are the essential ingredients of a symmetric cipher?

A symmetric encryption scheme has five ingredients: A) Plaintext: This is the original message or data that is fed into the algorith m as input. B) Encryption algorithm: The encryption algorithm performs various substitutions and transformations on the plaintext. C) Secret key: The secret key is also input to the encryption algorithm. The exa ct substitutions and transformations performed by the algorithm depend on the ke y. D) Ciphertext: This is the scrambled message produced as output. It depends on t he plaintext and the secret key. For a given message, two different keys will pr oduce two different ciphertexts. E) Decryption algorithm: This is essentially the encryption algorithm run in rev erse. It takes the ciphertext and the secret key and produces the original plain text. 2. What are the two basic functions used in encryption algorithms? Two basic functions used in Encryption Algorithms are: A) Substitution B) Transp osition/Transformation 3. How many keys are required for two people to communicate via a symmetric ciph er? That depends on whether you use a symmetric (shared key) or asymmetric (public/p rivate key pair) algorithm. If you use a symmetric key, it means both people have the same key which has bee n pre-shared via some secure means. In that case, only one key is required; both parties in the communication use the same key to encrypt and decrypt all messag es. If you use an asymmetric key algorithm, it takes at least 4 keys total: when sen ding a message each user will encrypt their message with the public key of the r ecipient (that accounts for two of the keys). Each recipient must then use their private key to decrypt the messages they receive (which accounts for the other two required keys). 4. What is the difference between a block cipher and a stream cipher? Stream cipher is one that encrypts a digital data stream one bit or one byte at a time. Block cipher is one in which a block of plaintext is treated as a whole n used to produce a ciphertext block of equal length. 5. What are the two general approaches to attacking a cipher? The two general approaches to attack a cipher are A) Cryptanalysis and B) Brute Force Attack. 6. Why do some block cipher modes of operation only use encryption while others use both encryption and decryption? Some block cipher modes of operation only use encryption because the input is se t to some initialization vector and the leftmost bits of the output of the encry ption function are XORed with the first segment of plain text p1 to produce the first unit of cipher text C1 and it is transmitted. While in decryption, the cip her text is XORed with the output of the encryption function to produce the plai n text. 7. What is triple encryption?

For some time it has been common practice to protect and tansport a key for DES encryption with triple-DES (3DES). The function follows an encrypt-decrypt-encry pt (EDE) sequence. Decrypt sequence is simply the same (encrypt) operation with the keys reversed. 8. Why is the middle portion of 3DES a decryption rather than an encryption? Below are three reasons why the middle portion of 3DES is a decryption rather th an encryption: A) It's a decryption process in order to change the traditional nature of the DE S, if it's an encryption, it'll stay a DES but with longer key size. B) In the cryptography, there is no significance of using the decryption in the middle stage, the only advantage of doing so is to allow users of 3DES to decryp t data encrypted by the users of the older single DES C = Ek1[Dk2[Ek1[P]]] = Ek1[P]. Suppose that the middle portion is decryption in stead of encryption, C = Ek1[Ek2[Ek1[P]]] The previous assumption in equation 1 will not be ever met. On the other hand C) If an encryption process is done instead of decryption the meet-in-the-middle attack becomes possible.