Null cipher

A null cipher is an ancient form of encryption where the plaintext is mixed with a large amount of non-cipher material. It would today be regarded as a simple form of steganography. Null ciphers can also be used to hide ciphertext, as part of a more complex system.

In classical cryptography a null is intended to confuse the cryptanalyst. Typically, a null will be a character which decrypts to obvious nonsense at the end of an otherwise intelligible phrase. In a null cipher, most of the characters may be nulls.

An example follows (Kipper 9):

News Eight Weather: Tonight increasing snow. Unexpected precipitation smothers eastern towns. Be extremely cautious and use snowtires especially heading east. The [highway is not] knowingly slippery. Highway evacuation is suspected. Police report emergency situations in downtown ending near Tuesday.

Taking the first letter in each word successively yields the real message: "Newt is upset because he thinks he is President."

Identity function encryption

In modern cryptology, null cipher (or NONE cipher) is also defined as choosing not to use encryption in a system where various encryption options are offered, such as for testing/debugging, or authentication-only communication. Thus the text is the same before and after encryption. In mathematics such a function is known as the identity function. Examples of this are the "eNull", "aNull", "Null" and "aDH" cipher suites in OpenSSL^[1] and the "NULL Encryption Algorithm" in IPSec^[2].

Decoy Cypher

The weak link in decryption is the human in the loop. Human computation is slow and expensive. Whenever a cypher needs to be sent to a human for semantic processing, this substantially increases the cost of decryption.

A decoy cypher can take the form of noise - sending copious messages of encrypted garbage plaintext. This decreases the signal-to-noise ratio for humans trying to interpret decrypted "plaintext" messages.

A decoy cypher can also take the form of misleading information - for example, in an onion cypher, most of the layers may contain information that when decrypted will produce a message that directly misleads the person reading it - often resulting in them taking actions against their interest - such as signalling that they are evesdropping by responding to a specific false signal, false flag attacks, or causing them to suspect the wrong parties. The actual message can still be contained at some level of the onion - but preferably not the lowest level - which may include an innocuous message so that if all layers are decrypted the core seems innocent. (see noise decoy cypher).

References

• Kipper, Gregory Investigator’s guide to steganography 2004 CRC Press LLC
• High Performance Enabled SSH/SCP (Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center) Retrieved 16-12-2008.

1. ^ http://www.openssl.org/docs/apps/ciphers.html OpenSSL: Documents, ciphers(1)
2. ^ RFC 2410 The NULL Encryption Algorithm and Its Use With IPsec