Abstract
Honey Encryption (HE), introduced by Juels and Ristenpart (Eurocrypt 2014, [12]), is an encryption paradigm designed to produce ciphertexts yielding plausible-looking but bogus plaintexts upon decryption with wrong keys. Thus brute-force attackers need to use additional information to determine whether they indeed found the correct key.
At the end of their paper, Juels and Ristenpart leave as an open question the adaptation of honey encryption to natural language messages. A recent paper by Chatterjee et al. [5] takes a mild attempt at the challenge and constructs a natural language honey encryption scheme relying on simple models for passwords.
In this position paper we explain why this approach cannot be extended to reasonable-size human-written documents e.g. e-mails. We propose an alternative solution and evaluate its security.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
We stress that unlike e.g. Kamouflage [1] which deals with passwords, syntactic honey encyrption applies to natural language.
- 3.
Note that such a skeleton might be ambiguous in certain constructions, for instance in sentences such as “Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana”.
- 4.
- 5.
See for instance http://www.ngrams.info/.
- 6.
An extreme example is William Shakespeare’s use of inversion as a poetic device: “If’t be so, For Banquo’s issue have I fil’d my mind,/ For them the gracious Duncan have I murther’d,/Put rancors in the vessel of my peace” (MacBeth, III.1.8).
- 7.
We may assume that communication with such services is secure, i.e. confidential and non-malleable, for the sake of argument.
- 8.
The Arabic equivalent is madrasa.
- 9.
The way some characters do in Umberto Eco’s novel, Il pendolo di Foucault[10].
- 10.
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Beunardeau, M., Ferradi, H., Géraud, R., Naccache, D. (2017). Honey Encryption for Language. In: Phan, RW., Yung, M. (eds) Paradigms in Cryptology – Mycrypt 2016. Malicious and Exploratory Cryptology. Mycrypt 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10311. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61273-7_7
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