Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2017/031

Honey Encryption for Language

Marc Beunardeau and Houda Ferradi and Rémi Géraud and David Naccache

Abstract: Honey Encryption (HE), introduced by Juels and Ristenpart (Eurocrypt 2014), 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. 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 approach and evaluate its security.

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Date: received 11 Jan 2017

Contact author: remi geraud at ens fr

Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation

Version: 20170113:182710 (All versions of this report)

Short URL: ia.cr/2017/031