There are two types of cryptographic encryption techniques namely symmetric and asymmetric encryption algorithms. Symmetric encryption employs single secret key for both encryption and decryption purposes. Whereas in asymmetric encryption, the communicating parties employ typically two keys namely private key and public key for encryption and/or decryption purposes.
Cryptographic attacks can be directed against cryptographic algorithms employed in protocols, against the cryptographic techniques employed in implementing the cryptographic algorithms and protocols, or sometimes against the cryptographic protocols themselves. Furthermore, Cryptographic attacks occurs due to the algorithms, the people, the processes and the technologies involved in securing organizations. Besides, many cryptographic attacks have recently been effective due to advances in computing, mathematical breakthroughs and other improvements in cryptanalysis techniques.
Organization should take note of some common cryptographic attacks to protect their assets and minimize risks to their systems and applications. Some of the most common cryptographic attacks are briefly discussed as follows:
- Brute-force attack: the cyber attacker tries all possible keys until they find out the correct cryptographic key through employing various cryptanalysis techniques. Moreover, It is a type of cyberattack that an attacker tries every possible combinations to guess the key using massive amount computing and processing power.
- Frequency analysis attack: It involves counting the number of times each letter or character appears in the ciphertext of a given message.
- Ciphertext only attack: An attack only has access to the ciphertext to guess the plaintext, or the cryptovariable if they can as well
- Known plaintext attack: The attacker possesses a copy of the encrypted message and the plaintext message that is used to produce the ciphertext.
- Chosen plaintext attack: The cyber attacker obtains the ciphertexts corresponding to a set of plaintext message of their own choosing. The purpose of chosen plaintext is to enable the attacker in attempting to drive the cryptographic key used and thereby decrypting other plaintext messages that are encrypted with the same key.
- Chosen ciphertext attack: The cyber attacker decrypts chosen portions of the ciphertext message and use that decrypted massage to discover the cryptographic key.
- Covert of Side-channel attack: Side-channel attacks involves measuring components of the cryptographic process to drive information to help in compromising encrypted information, such as timing, power consumption, error information, electronic emanation and so on.
- Implementation attacks: A type of cyberattack that manipulates weaknesses in the implementation of a cryptographic systems, protocols and algorithms.
- Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) attack: A malicious individual will reside between two communicating parties and intercepts every communications. In man-in-the-middle attack, the malicious actor sits in the middle of the communication and disclose all the traffic that passes through the communication channel.
- Fault injection attack: A side-channel attack that involves deliberately implanting faulty or erroneous inputs and observing the situation of the errors and the possible outputs.
- Timing attack: A side-channel attack that involves the attacker attempting to compromise cryptographic system by probing the time taken to execute the cryptographic algorithm in the encryption and decryption processes.
- Pass the hash (PtH) attack: Pass-the-hash (PtH) is a type of cyberattack that occurs when an attacker obtains a hash value of a password and passes it through to the authentication system to gain unauthorized access to resources.
- Meet-in-the-middle attack: A malicious employed to defeat cryptographic algorithms that use two rounds of encryption.
- Birthday attack: Birthday attack, sometimes dubbed as a collision attack, attempts to find flaws in the one-to-one nature of hashing algorithms. Furthermore, the malicious actor seeks to replace in a digitally signed communication a different message that generates the same message digest value. In addition, this enables the attacker to maintain the validity of the original digital signature.