Your security strategy should not, however, solely rely on encryption. Nevertheless, data encryption can deter hackers from accessing sensitive information, and is essential to most security strategies.

Encrypted data at rest can be compromised, either by malware on a storage device, or by unauthorized users who gain access to user passwords or keys.

Authorized devices can be infected by malware that ‘sniffs’ data or ‘eavesdrops’ as data travels across networks.

Encrypted data in transit can be vulnerable.

It is possible to use computer programs to break some encryption algorithms and gain access to encrypted content, although stronger encryptions require a massive amount of computing resources to break.

Only the sender and the recipient of the data should have access to the decryption key.Īs you deploy an encryption solution, you should be aware that encryption is vulnerable to attack from several directions: Encrypted data can only be read or processed after it has been decrypted, using a decryption key or password. I hope you take this with the sincerity I intended.Data encryption is a method of converting data from a readable format (plaintext) into an unreadable, encoded format (ciphertext).

History rings loud and clear the subtleties of cryptographic design and how despite incorporating the best cryptography, a product can be holier than Swiss cheese and have the information leakage to match. These attacks may not be as simple as attacking a given file, but may require a communication model, where Alice is communicating with Bob (e.g., Kohno's work on WinZip).Ĭhallenges like yours usually fall on deaf ears, because they fail to exhibit an understanding of real-world cryptographic product analysis - that is, a cryptographic product must be analyzed as an entire product. I haven't yet read Yeo and Phan's work on WinRAR, but it appears that they're familiar with Kohno's work on WinZip, and conclude that WinRAR provides 'slightly' better security than WinZip - at least for the versions that were analyzed at that time. Tadayoshi Kohno demonstrated this with his attacks against WinZip, which looked rather secure on the surface, since it employed strong cryptographic primitives in the encrypt-then-authenticate generic composition in other words, it followed best practice. Our results, compared to recent attacks on WinZip by Kohno, show that WinRAR appears to offer slightly better security features.Ĭlick to expand.Bear this in mind: It's paramount that we question security nowhere is it more important than when we are dealing with real-world implementations of security, and Dr. Instead, time and again such a practice has shown to result in flawed systems. In other words, no matter how securely designed each primitive is, using them especially in association with other primitives does not always guarantee secure systems. These attacks are possible due to the subtlety in developing security software based on the integration of multiple cryptographic primitives.

In this paper, we present several attacks on the encryption feature provided by the WinRAR compression software. Therefore, encryption-enabled compression software such as WinRAR and WinZip tend to be more widely used for security than a dedicated security software.

However, since compression has been much in use well before users saw the need for security, most are more familiar with compression software than they are with security ones. Originally written to provide the file compression feature, computer software such as WinRAR and WinZip now also provide encryption features due to the rising need for security and privacy protection of files within a computer system or for sharing within a network. International Journal of Information Security

On the security of the WinRAR encryption feature

What is encryption software used for