Systems Security Certified Practitioner – SSCP – Question0694

What is the role of IKE within the IPsec protocol?

A.
peer authentication and key exchange
B. data encryption
C. data signature
D. enforcing quality of service

Correct Answer: A

Explanation:

Reference: RFC 2409: The Internet Key Exchange (IKE); DORASWAMY, Naganand & HARKINS, Dan, Ipsec: The New Security Standard for the Internet, Intranets, and Virtual Private Networks, 1999, Prentice Hall PTR; SMITH, Richard E., Internet Cryptography, 1997, Addison-Wesley Pub Co.

Systems Security Certified Practitioner – SSCP – Question0693

Which of the following are suitable protocols for securing VPN connections at the lower layers of the OSI model?

A.
S/MIME and SSH
B. TLS and SSL
C. IPsec and L2TP
D. PKCS#10 and X.509

Correct Answer: C

Explanation:

Reference: HARRIS, Shon, All-In-One CISSP Certification Exam Guide, 2001, McGraw-Hill/Osborne, page 467; SMITH, Richard E., Internet Cryptography, 1997, Addison-Wesley Pub Co.

Systems Security Certified Practitioner – SSCP – Question0692

The Clipper Chip utilizes which concept in public key cryptography?

A.
Substitution
B. Key Escrow
C. An undefined algorithm
D. Super strong encryption

Correct Answer: B

Explanation:

The Clipper chip is a chipset that was developed and promoted by the U.S. Government as an encryption device to be adopted by telecommunications companies for voice transmission. It was announced in 1993 and by 1996 was entirely defunct.
The heart of the concept was key escrow. In the factory, any new telephone or other device with a Clipper chip would be given a “cryptographic key”, that would then be provided to the government in “escrow”. If government agencies “established their authority” to listen to a communication, then the password would be given to those government agencies, who could then decrypt all data transmitted by that particular telephone.
The CISSP Prep Guide states, “The idea is to divide the key into two parts, and to escrow two portions of the key with two separate ‘trusted’ organizations. Then, law enforcement officals, after obtaining a court order, can retreive the two pieces of the key from the organizations and decrypt the message.”
References: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_Chip and Source: KRUTZ, Ronald L. & VINES, Russel D., The CISSP Prep Guide: Mastering the Ten Domains of Computer Security, John Wiley & Sons, 2001, page 166.

Systems Security Certified Practitioner – SSCP – Question0691

The RSA Algorithm uses which mathematical concept as the basis of its encryption?

A.
Geometry
B. 16-round ciphers
C. PI (3.14159…)
D. Two large prime numbers

Correct Answer: D

Explanation:

Source: TIPTON, et. al, Official (ISC)2 Guide to the CISSP CBK, 2007 edition, page 254.
And from the RSA web site, http://www.rsa.com/rsalabs/node.asp?id=2214 : The RSA cryptosystem is a public-key cryptosystem that offers both encryption and digital signatures (authentication). Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman developed the RSA system in 1977 [RSA78]; RSA stands for the first letter in each of its inventors’ last names.
The RSA algorithm works as follows: take two large primes, p and q, and compute their product n = pq; n is called the modulus. Choose a number, e, less than n and relatively prime to (p-1)(q-1), which means e and (p-1)(q-1) have no common factors except 1. Find another number d such that (ed -1) is divisible by (p-1)(q-1). The values e and d are called the public and private exponents, respectively. The public key is the pair (n, e); the private key is (n, d). The factors p and q may be destroyed or kept with the private key.
It is currently difficult to obtain the private key d from the public key (n, e). However if one could factor n into p and q, then one could obtain the private key d. Thus the security of the RSA system is based on the assumption that factoring is difficult. The discovery of an easy method of factoring would “break” RSA (see Question 3.1.3 and Question 2.3.3).
Here is how the RSA system can be used for encryption and digital signatures (in practice, the actual use is slightly different; see Questions 3.1.7 and 3.1.8): Encryption
Suppose Alice wants to send a message m to Bob. Alice creates the ciphertext c by exponentiating: c = me mod n, where e and n are Bob’s public key. She sends c to Bob. To decrypt, Bob also exponentiates: m = cd mod n; the relationship between e and d ensures that Bob correctly recovers m. Since only Bob knows d, only Bob can decrypt this message.
Digital Signature Suppose Alice wants to send a message m to Bob in such a way that Bob is assured the message is both authentic, has not been tampered with, and from Alice. Alice creates a digital signature s by exponentiating: s = md mod n, where d and n are Alice’s private key. She sends m and s to Bob. To verify the signature, Bob exponentiates and checks that the message m is recovered: m = se mod n, where e and n are Alice’s public key.
Thus encryption and authentication take place without any sharing of private keys: each person uses only another’s public key or their own private key. Anyone can send an encrypted message or verify a signed message, but only someone in possession of the correct private key can decrypt or sign a message.

Systems Security Certified Practitioner – SSCP – Question0690

The Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA-1) creates:

A.
a fixed length message digest from a fixed length input message
B. a variable length message digest from a variable length input message
C. a fixed length message digest from a variable length input message
D. a variable length message digest from a fixed length input message

Correct Answer: C

Explanation:

According to The CISSP Prep Guide, “The Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA-1) computes a fixed length message digest from a variable length input message.” Source: KRUTZ, Ronald L. & VINES, Russel D., The CISSP Prep Guide: Mastering the Ten Domains of Computer Security, John Wiley & Sons, 2001, page 160.
also see: http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/fips/fips180-2/fips180-2withchang…

Systems Security Certified Practitioner – SSCP – Question0689

What is the length of an MD5 message digest?

A.
128 bits
B. 160 bits
C. 256 bits
D. varies depending upon the message size.

Correct Answer: A

Explanation:

A hash algorithm (alternatively, hash “function”) takes binary data, called the message, and produces a condensed representation, called the message digest. A cryptographic hash algorithm is a hash algorithm that is designed to achieve certain security properties. The Federal Information Processing Standard 180-3, Secure Hash Standard, specifies five cryptographic hash algorithms -SHA-1, SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512 for federal use in the US; the standard was also widely adopted by the information technology industry and commercial companies.
The MD5 Message-Digest Algorithm is a widely used cryptographic hash function that produces a 128-bit (16-byte) hash value.
Specified in RFC 1321, MD5 has been employed in a wide variety of security applications, and is also commonly used to check data integrity. MD5 was designed by Ron Rivest in 1991 to replace an earlier hash function, MD4. An MD5 hash is typically expressed as a 32-digit hexadecimal number.
However, it has since been shown that MD5 is not collision resistant; as such, MD5 is not suitable for applications like SSL certificates or digital signatures that rely on this property. In 1996, a flaw was found with the design of MD5, and while it was not a clearly fatal weakness, cryptographers began recommending the use of other algorithms, such as SHA-1 -which has since been found also to be vulnerable. In 2004, more serious flaws were discovered in MD5, making further use of the algorithm for security purposes questionable -specifically, a group of researchers described how to create a pair of files that share the same MD5 checksum. Further advances were made in breaking MD5 in 2005, 2006, and 2007. In December 2008, a group of researchers used this technique to fake SSL certificate validity, and US-CERT now says that MD5 “should be considered cryptographically broken and unsuitable for further use.” and most U.S. government applications now require the SHA-2 family of hash functions.
NIST CRYPTOGRAPHIC HASH PROJECT NIST announced a public competition in a Federal Register Notice on November 2, 2007 to develop a new cryptographic hash algorithm, called SHA-3, for standardization. The competition was NIST’s response to advances made in the cryptanalysis of hash algorithms.
NIST received sixty-four entries from cryptographers around the world by October 31, 2008, and selected fifty-one first-round candidates in December 2008, fourteen second-round candidates in July 2009, and five finalists – BLAKE, Grstl, JH, Keccak and Skein, in December 2010 to advance to the third and final round of the competition.
Throughout the competition, the cryptographic community has provided an enormous amount of feedback. Most of the comments were sent to NIST and a public hash forum; in addition, many of the cryptanalysis and performance studies were published as papers in major cryptographic conferences or leading cryptographic journals. NIST also hosted a SHA-3 candidate conference in each round to obtain public feedback. Based on the public comments and internal review of the candidates, NIST announced Keccak as the winner of the SHA-3 Cryptographic Hash Algorithm Competition on October 2, 2012, and ended the five-year competition.
Reference: Tipton, Harold, et. al., Officical (ISC)2 Guide to the CISSP CBK, 2007 edition, page 261. and https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Md5 and http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST/hash/sha-3/index.html

Systems Security Certified Practitioner – SSCP – Question0688

In a known plaintext attack, the cryptanalyst has knowledge of which of the following?

A.
the ciphertext and the key
B. the plaintext and the secret key
C. both the plaintext and the associated ciphertext of several messages
D. the plaintext and the algorithm

Correct Answer: C

Explanation:

In a known plaintext attack, the attacker has the plaintext and ciphertext of one or more messages. The goal is to discover the key used to encrypt the messages so that other messages can be deciphered and read. Source: HARRIS, Shon, All-In-One CISSP Certification Exam Guide, McGraw-Hill/Osborne, 3rd Ed., chapter 8: Cryptography (page 676). Also check out: Handbook of Applied Cryptography 4th Edition by Alfred J. Menezes, Paul C. van Oorschot and Scott A. Vanstone.

Systems Security Certified Practitioner – SSCP – Question0687

Which of the following ciphers is a subset on which the Vigenere polyalphabetic cipher was based on?

A.
Caesar
B. The Jefferson disks
C. Enigma
D. SIGABA

Correct Answer: A

Explanation:

In cryptography, a Caesar cipher, also known as Caesar’s cipher, the shift cipher, Caesar’s code or Caesar shift, is one of the simplest and most widely known encryption techniques. It is a type of substitution cipher in which each letter in the plaintext is replaced by a letter some fixed number of positions down the alphabet. For example, with a left shift of 3, D would be replaced by A, E would become B, and so on. The method is named after Julius Caesar, who used it in his private correspondence.
The encryption step performed by a Caesar cipher is often incorporated as part of more complex schemes, such as the Vigenère cipher, and still has modern application in the ROT13 system. As with all single alphabet substitution ciphers, the Caesar cipher is easily broken and in modern practice offers essentially no communication security.
The following answer were incorrect: The Jefferson disk, or wheel cipher as Thomas Jefferson named it, also known as the Bazeries Cylinder, is a cipher system using a set of wheels or disks, each with the 26 letters of the alphabet arranged around their edge. The order of the letters is different for each disk and is usually scrambled in some random way. Each disk is marked with a unique number. A hole in the centre of the disks allows them to be stacked on an axle. The disks are removable and can be mounted on the axle in any order desired. The order of the disks is the cipher key, and both sender and receiver must arrange the disks in the same predefined order. Jefferson’s device had 36 disks.
An Enigma machine is any of a family of related electro-mechanical rotor cipher machines used for the encryption and decryption of secret messages. Enigma was invented by the German engineer Arthur Scherbius at the end of World War I. The early models were used commercially from the early 1920s, and adopted by military and government services of several countries. Several different Enigma models were produced, but the German military models are the ones most commonly discussed.
SIGABA: In the history of cryptography, the ECM Mark II was a cipher machine used by the United States for message encryption from World War II until the 1950s. The machine was also known as the SIGABA or Converter M-134 by the Army, or CSP-888/889 by the Navy, and a modified Navy version was termed the CSP-2900. Like many machines of the era it used an electromechanical system of rotors in order to encipher messages, but with a number of security improvements over previous designs. No successful cryptanalysis of the machine during its service lifetime is publicly known.
Reference(s) used for this question: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_disk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigaba http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_machine

Systems Security Certified Practitioner – SSCP – Question0686

Which of the following is NOT a true statement regarding the implementaton of the 3DES modes?

A.
DES-EEE1 uses one key
B. DES-EEE2 uses two keys
C. DES-EEE3 uses three keys
D. DES-EDE2 uses two keys

Correct Answer: A

Explanation:

There is no DES mode call DES-EEE1. It does not exist.
The following are the correct modes for triple-DES (3DES):
DES-EEE3 uses three keys for encryption and the data is encrypted, encrypted, encrypted; DES-EDE3 uses three keys and encrypts, decrypts and encrypts data.
DES-EEE2 and DES-EDE2 are the same as the previous modes, but the first and third operations use the same key.
Reference(s) used for this question: Shon Harris, CISSP All In One (AIO) book, 6th edition , page 808 and Official ISC2 Guide to the CISSP CBK, 2nd Edition (2010) , page 344-345

Systems Security Certified Practitioner – SSCP – Question0685

Which of the following cryptographic attacks describes when the attacker has a copy of the plaintext and the corresponding ciphertext?

A.
known plaintext
B. brute force
C. ciphertext only
D. chosen plaintext

Correct Answer: A

Explanation:

The goal to this type of attack is to find the cryptographic key that was used to encrypt the message. Once the key has been found, the attacker would then be able to decrypt all messages that had been encrypted using that key.
The known-plaintext attack (KPA) or crib is an attack model for cryptanalysis where the attacker has samples of both the plaintext and its encrypted version (ciphertext), and is at liberty to make use of them to reveal further secret information such as secret keys and code books. The term “crib” originated at Bletchley Park, the British World War II decryption operation
In cryptography, a brute force attack or exhaustive key search is a strategy that can in theory be used against any encrypted data by an attacker who is unable to take advantage of any weakness in an encryption system that would otherwise make his task easier. It involves systematically checking all possible keys until the correct key is found. In the worst case, this would involve traversing the entire key space, also called search space.
In cryptography, a ciphertext-only attack (COA) or known ciphertext attack is an attack model for cryptanalysis where the attacker is assumed to have access only to a set of ciphertexts.
The attack is completely successful if the corresponding plaintexts can be deduced, or even better, the key. The ability to obtain any information at all about the underlying plaintext is still considered a success. For example, if an adversary is sending ciphertext continuously to maintain traffic-flow security, it would be very useful to be able to distinguish real messages from nulls. Even making an informed guess of the existence of real messages would facilitate traffic analysis.
In the history of cryptography, early ciphers, implemented using pen-and-paper, were routinely broken using ciphertexts alone. Cryptographers developed statistical techniques for attacking ciphertext, such as frequency analysis. Mechanical encryption devices such as Enigma made these attacks much more difficult (although, historically, Polish cryptographers were able to mount a successful ciphertext-only cryptanalysis of the Enigma by exploiting an insecure protocol for indicating the message settings).
Every modern cipher attempts to provide protection against ciphertext-only attacks. The vetting process for a new cipher design standard usually takes many years and includes exhaustive testing of large quantities of ciphertext for any statistical departure from random noise. See: Advanced Encryption Standard process. Also, the field of steganography evolved, in part, to develop methods like mimic functions that allow one piece of data to adopt the statistical profile of another. Nonetheless poor cipher usage or reliance on home-grown proprietary algorithms that have not been subject to thorough scrutiny has resulted in many computer-age encryption systems that are still subject to ciphertext-only attack. Examples include:
Early versions of Microsoft’s PPTP virtual private network software used the same RC4 key for the sender and the receiver (later versions had other problems). In any case where a stream cipher like RC4 is used twice with the same key it is open to ciphertext-only attack. See: stream cipher attack
Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP), the first security protocol for Wi-Fi, proved vulnerable to several attacks, most of them ciphertext-only.
A chosen-plaintext attack (CPA) is an attack model for cryptanalysis which presumes that the attacker has the capability to choose arbitrary plaintexts to be encrypted and obtain the corresponding ciphertexts. The goal of the attack is to gain some further information which reduces the security of the encryption scheme. In the worst case, a chosen-plaintext attack could reveal the scheme’s secret key.
This appears, at first glance, to be an unrealistic model; it would certainly be unlikely that an attacker could persuade a human cryptographer to encrypt large amounts of plaintexts of the attacker’s choosing. Modern cryptography, on the other hand, is implemented in software or hardware and is used for a diverse range of applications; for many cases, a chosen-plaintext attack is often very feasible. Chosen-plaintext attacks become extremely important in the context of public key cryptography, where the encryption key is public and attackers can encrypt any plaintext they choose.
Any cipher that can prevent chosen-plaintext attacks is then also guaranteed to be secure against known-plaintext and ciphertext-only attacks; this is a conservative approach to security.
Two forms of chosen-plaintext attack can be distinguished:
Batch chosen-plaintext attack, where the cryptanalyst chooses all plaintexts before any of them are encrypted. This is often the meaning of an unqualified use of “chosen-plaintext attack”.
Adaptive chosen-plaintext attack, where the cryptanalyst makes a series of interactive queries, choosing subsequent plaintexts based on the information from the previous encryptions.
References: Source: TIPTON, Harold, Official (ISC)2 Guide to the CISSP CBK (2007), page 271. and Wikipedia at the following links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chosen-plaintext_attack http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Known-plaintext_attack http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciphertext-only_attack http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brute_force_attack