Abstract
We introduce honey encryption (HE), a simple, general approach to encrypting messages using low min-entropy keys such as passwords. HE is designed to produce a ciphertext which, when decrypted with any of a number of incorrect keys, yields plausible-looking but bogus plaintexts called honey messages. A key benefit of HE is that it provides security in cases where too little entropy is available to withstand brute-force attacks that try every key; in this sense, HE provides security beyond conventional brute-force bounds. HE can also provide a hedge against partial disclosure of high min-entropy keys.
HE significantly improves security in a number of practical settings. To showcase this improvement, we build concrete HE schemes for password-based encryption of RSA secret keys and credit card numbers. The key challenges are development of appropriate instances of a new type of randomized message encoding scheme called a distribution-transforming encoder (DTE), and analyses of the expected maximum loading of bins in various kinds of balls-and-bins games.
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Juels, A., Ristenpart, T. (2014). Honey Encryption: Security Beyond the Brute-Force Bound. In: Nguyen, P.Q., Oswald, E. (eds) Advances in Cryptology – EUROCRYPT 2014. EUROCRYPT 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8441. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-55220-5_17
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