Question

what are the Vulnerabilites of honey encryption algorithm in cryptography?

please give a detailed list with descritpions.

Answer 1

Before moving to answer directly let us understand what is a honey encryption algorithm.

Honey encryption is a type of data encryption that "produces a ciphertext, which, when decrypted with an incorrect key as guessed by the attacker, presents a plausible-looking yet incorrect plaintext password or encryption key."

For example- The debit card uses a 6-digit password for withdrawing money from the ATM. Honey encryption can help to protect such passwords from brute-force attacks.

Vulnerabilities of honey encryption algorithm are

1- Honey encryption is suitable for a small, not large, message space as the overhead of processing a large message space is very high. In this mechanism, the distribution-transforming encoder( DTE) needs to peruse the message space and inverse_table document line by line for encryption and decoding if the message space is bigger than the accessible framework memory. Having these records in the memory will accelerate the inquiry (e.g., by utilizing the paired pursuit technique) for decoding.

2- The message space should be carefully designed, or honey encryption cannot well address the brute-force vulnerability. Although a plaintext derived by DTE from a wrongly guessed key looks like a correctly decrypted ciphertext, attackers can use a different approach to confirm whether the guessed key is incorrect if the message space has not been carefully designed. In the cell phone number case, the attacker can dial the mobile number to check whether the number is the correct one.

3- The capacity for securing delicate private information provided by honey encryption varies for different applications. The decryption process outputs a message from the message space, no matter whether the key is correct or not. This feature could leak some valid messages and this may have a different impact on different applications. Taking the identification number, for example, a malicious user can still get some valid identification numbers from the system, but the attacker may not be able to get the corresponding name of the identification holder. So the possibility for the attacker to maliciously use the identification to commit crimes is limited.