Cryptography Protocols Interview Preparation Guide

PEM is the draft Internet Privacy-Enhanced Mail standard, designed, proposed, but not yet officially adopted, by the Internet Activities Board to provide secure electronic mail over the Internet. Designed to work with RFC 822 e-mail formats, PEM includes encryption, authentication, and key management, and allows use of both public-key and secret-key cryptosystems. Multiple cryptographic tools are supported; for each mail message, the specific encryption algorithm, digital signature algorithm, hash function, and so on are specified in the header. PEM explicitly supports only a few cryptographic algorithms; others may be added later. DES in CBC mode is currently the only message encryption algorithm supported, and both RSA and DES are supported for key management. Public-key management in PEM is based on X.509 certificates.

S/MIME (Secure/ Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) is a protocol that adds digital signatures and encryption to Internet MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) messages described in RFC 1521. MIME is the official proposed standard format for extended Internet electronic mail. Internet e-mail messages consist of two parts, the header and the body. The header forms a collection of field/value pairs structured to provide information essential for the transmission of the message. The structure of the headers can be found in RFC 822. The body is normally unstructured unless the e-mail is in MIME format. MIME defines how the body of an e-mail message is structured. The MIME format permits e-mail to include enhanced text, graphics, audio, and more in a standardized manner via MIME-compliant mail systems. However, MIME itself does not provide any security services. The purpose of S/MIME is to define such services, following the syntax given in PKCS #7 for digital signatures and encryption. The MIME body part carries a PKCS #7 message, which itself is the result of cryptographic processing on other MIME body parts.

PEM-MIME, also known as MIME Object Security Standard or MOSS, is a proposed Internet Draft [CFG95] that is designed to be a successor to PEM. It proposes adding PEM- based security services to MIME messages in much the same manner as S/MIME. Due to the nature of MIME, it is possible to apply different security services to each part of the body. For example, the MIME body may contain two copies of a message, with one copy digitally signed and the other copy not modified in any way. This will allow a recipient to read the message even if the recipient does not have a MIME-compliant mail reader. If the recipient has a privacy-enhanced MIME compliant mail reader, the recipient will be able to verify the digital signature as well. Another possibility would be to encrypt different blocks of the message body using different keys and algorithms, or to sign some blocks and not others need not b.

S-HTTP (Secure Hypertext Transfer Protocol) is an extension to HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) that provides security services. It was originally developed by Enterprise Integration Technologies, and further development continues at Terisa Systems. HTTP is the protocol that forms the basis of the World Wide Web, allowing the exchange of multimedia documents on the Web. S-HTTP is designed to provide confidentiality, authenticity, integrity, and non-repudiability while supporting multiple key management mechanisms and cryptographic algorithms via option negotiation between the parties involved in each transaction.

The SSL (Secure Socket Layer) Handshake Protocol was developed by Netscape Communications Corporation to provide security and privacy over the Internet. The protocol supports server and client authentication. The SSL protocol is application independent, allowing protocols like HTTP, FTP (File Transfer Protocol), and Telnet to be layered on top of it transparently. The SSL protocol is able to negotiate encryption keys as well as authenticate the server before data is exchanged by the higher-level application. The SSL protocol maintains the security and integrity of the transmission channel by using encryption, authentication and message authentication codes.

The main difference between the protocols is the layer at which they operate. SSL operates at the transport layer and mimics the "socket library," while S-HTTP operates at the application layer. Encryption of the transport layer allows SSL to be application-independent, while S-HTTP is limited to the specific software implementing it. The protocols adopt different philosophies towards encryption as well, with SSL encrypting the entire communications channel and S-HTTP encrypting each message independently. S-HTTP allows a user to produce digital signatures on any messages (not just specific messages during an authentication protocol), a feature SSL lacks. Terisa Systems is developing toolkits to support both protocols.

PCT stands for Private Communication Technology, a protocol developed by Microsoft and Visa International for secure communication on the Internet. It is a counterpart to Netscape's SSL protocol and a companion to the STT protocol. Like SSL, PCT is intended for Internet standardization.

The protocol is quite similar to SSL in many respects, and in fact the message formats are similar enough so that a server can interact with clients supporting SSL as well as client supporting PCT. According to the specification, PCT "corrects or improves on several weaknesses of SSL." The following are the main differences:

PCT involves fewer messages between the client and the server than SSL, and the messages themselves are shorter.

PCT has more choices in the negotiation of algorithm and data formats than SSL, and the negotiation has additional cryptographic protection so that the client and server can verify that their choices have not been modified.

The S/WAN (Secure Wide Area Network, pronounced "swan") initiative designates specifications for implementing IPSec, the security architecture for the Internet Protocol, to ensure interoperability among firewall and TCP/IP products. S/WAN's goal is to use IPSec to allow companies to mix-and-match the best firewall and TCP/IP stack products to build Internet-based Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). Currently, users and administrators are often locked in to single-vendor solutions network-wide, because vendors have been unable to agree upon the details of IPSec implementation. The S/WAN effort should therefore remove a major obstacle to the widespread deployment of secure VPNs.

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