Content Integrity - Security in Networks

Content Integrity

Content integrity comes as a bonus with cryptography. No one can change encrypted data in a meaningful way without breaking the encryption. This does not say, however, that encrypted data cannot be modified. Changing even one bit of an encrypted data stream affects the result after decryption, often in a way that seriously alters the resulting plaintext. We need to consider three potential threats:

·          malicious modification that changes content in a meaningful way

·          malicious or nonmalicious modification that changes content in a way that is not necessarily meaningful

·          nonmalicious modification that changes content in a way that will not be detected

Encryption addresses the first of these threats very effectively. To address the others, we can use other controls.

Error Correcting Codes

We can use error detection and error correction codes to guard against modification in a transmission. The codes work as their names imply: Error detection codes detect when an error has occurred, and error correction codes can actually correct errors without requiring retransmission of the original message. The error code is transmitted along with the original data, so the recipient can recompute the error code and check whether the received result matches the expected value.

The simplest error detection code is a parity check. An extra bit is added to an existing group of data bits depending on their sum or an exclusive OR. The two kinds of parity are called even and odd. With even parity the extra bit is 0 if the sum of the data bits is even and 1 if the sum is odd; that is, the parity bit is set so that the sum of all data bits plus the parity bit is even. Odd parity is the same except the sum is odd. For example, the data stream 01101101 would have an even parity bit of 1 (and an odd parity bit of 0) because 0+1+1+0+1+1+0+1 = 5 + 1 = 6 (or 5 + 0 = 5 for odd parity). A parity bit can reveal the modification of a single bit. However, parity does not detect two -bit errorscases in which two bits in a group are changed. That is, the use of a parity bit relies on the assumption that single-bit errors will occur infrequently, so it is very unlikely that two bits would be changed. Parity signals only that a bit has been changed; it does not identify which bit has been changed.

There are other kinds of error detection codes, such as hash codes and Huffman codes. Some of the more complex codes can detect multiple-bit errors (two or more bits changed in a data group) and may be able to pinpoint which bits have been changed.

Parity and simple error detection and correction codes are used to detect nonmalicious changes in situations in which there may be faulty transmission equipment, communications noise and interference, or other sources of spurious changes to data.

Cryptographic Checksum

Malicious modification must be handled in a way that prevents the attacker from modifying the error detection mechanism as well as the data bits themselves. One way to do this is to use a technique that shrinks and transforms the data, according to the value of the data bits.

To see how such an approach might work, consider an error detection code as a many-to-one transformation. That is, any error detection code reduces a block of data to a smaller digest whose value depends on each bit in the block. The proportion of reduction (that is, the ratio of original size of the block to transformed size) relates to the code's effectiveness in detecting errors. If a code reduces an 8-bit data block

to a 1-bit result, then half of the 2⁸ input values map to 0 and half to 1, assuming a uniform distribution of outputs. In other words, there are

2⁸/2 = 2⁷ = 128 different bit patterns that all produce the same 1-bit result. The fewer inputs that map to a particular output, the fewer ways the attacker can change an input value without affecting its output. Thus, a 1-bit result is too weak for many applications. If the output is

three bits instead of one, then each output result comes from 2⁸/2³ or 2⁵ = 32 inputs. The smaller number of inputs to a given output is important for blocking malicious modification.

A cryptographic checksum (sometimes called a message digest) is a cryptographic function that produces a checksum. The cryptography prevents the attacker from changing the data block (the plaintext) and also changing the checksum value (the ciphertext) to match. Two major uses of cryptographic checksums are code tamper protection and message integrity protection in transit. For code protection, a system administrator computes the checksum of each program file on a system and then later computes new checksums and compares the values. Because executable code usually does not change, the administrator can detect unanticipated changes from, for example, malicious code attacks. Similarly, a checksum on data in communication identifies data that have been changed in transmission, maliciously or accidentally.