Curious about Actual Eccouncil Certified Encryption Specialist (212-81) Exam Questions?

Correct : D

MD5

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD5

The MD5 message-digest algorithm is a widely used hash function producing a 128-bit hash value. Although MD5 was initially designed to be used as a cryptographic hash function, it has been found to suffer from extensive vulnerabilities. It can still be used as a checksum to verify data integrity, but only against unintentional corruption. It remains suitable for other non-cryptographic purposes, for example for determining the partition for a particular key in a partitioned database.

MD5 was designed by Ronald Rivest in 1991 to replace an earlier hash function MD4, and was specified in 1992 as RFC 1321.

Incorrect answers:

SHA1 -(Secure Hash Algorithm 1) is a cryptographic hash function which takes an input and produces a 160-bit (20-byte) hash value known as a message digest -- typically rendered as a hexadecimal number, 40 digits long. It was designed by the United States National Security Agency, and is a U.S. Federal Information Processing Standard.

RSA-(Rivest--Shamir--Adleman) is a public-key cryptosystem that is widely used for secure data transmission. It is also one of the oldest. The acronym RSA comes from the surnames of Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman, who publicly described the algorithm in 1977. An equivalent system was developed secretly, in 1973 at GCHQ (the British signals intelligence agency), by the English mathematician Clifford Cocks. That system was declassified in 1997.

SHA-256 -SHA-2 (Secure Hash Algorithm 2) is a set of cryptographic hash functions designed by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) and first published in 2001. They are built using the Merkle--Damgrd structure, from a one-way compression function itself built using the Davies--Meyer structure from a specialized block cipher. SHA-2 includes significant changes from its predecessor, SHA-1. The SHA-2 family consists of six hash functions with digests (hash values) that are 224, 256, 384 or 512 bits: SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, SHA-512, SHA-512/224, SHA-512/256

Correct : A

Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wired_Equivalent_Privacy#Weak_security

In 2007, Erik Tews, Andrei Pychkine, and Ralf-Philipp Weinmann were able to extend Klein's 2005 attack and optimize it for usage against WEP. With the new attack it is possible to recover a 104-bit WEP key with probability 50% using only 40,000 captured packets. For 60,000 available data packets, the success probability is about 80% and for 85,000 data packets about 95%. Using active techniques like deauth and ARP re-injection, 40,000 packets can be captured in less than one minute under good conditions. The actual computation takes about 3 seconds and 3 MB of main memory on a Pentium-M 1.7 GHz and can additionally be optimized for devices with slower CPUs. The same attack can be used for 40-bit keys with an even higher success probability.

Correct : D

Integrity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_hash_function#Verifying_the_integrity_of_messages_and_files

An important application of secure hashes is verification of message integrity. Comparing message digests (hash digests over the message) calculated before, and after, transmission can determine whether any changes have been made to the message or file.

Correct : C

Brute force

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brute-force_attack

A brute-force attack consists of an attacker submitting many passwords or passphrases with the hope of eventually guessing correctly. The attacker systematically checks all possible passwords and passphrases until the correct one is found. Alternatively, the attacker can attempt to guess the key which is typically created from the password using a key derivation function. This is known as an exhaustive key search.

A brute-force attack is a cryptanalytic attack that can, in theory, be used to attempt to decrypt any encrypted data (except for data encrypted in an information-theoretically secure manner). Such an attack might be used when it is not possible to take advantage of other weaknesses in an encryption system (if any exist) that would make the task easier.

Incorrect answers:

Rainbow tables -is a precomputed table for caching the output of cryptographic hash functions, usually for cracking password hashes. Tables are usually used in recovering a key derivation function (or credit card numbers, etc.) up to a certain length consisting of a limited set of characters.

Dictionary attack -is a form of brute force attack technique for defeating a cipher or authentication mechanism by trying to determine its decryption key or passphrase by trying thousands or millions of likely possibilities, such as words in a dictionary or previously used passwords, often from lists obtained from past security breaches.

Shoulder surfing -is a type of social engineering technique used to obtain information such as personal identification numbers (PINs), passwords and other confidential data by looking over the victim's shoulder, either from keystrokes on a device or sensitive information being spoken and heard, also known as eavesdropping.

Correct : A

Public keys

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography

Public-key cryptography, or asymmetric cryptography, is a cryptographic system that uses pairs of keys: public keys, which may be disseminated widely, and private keys, which are known only to the owner. The generation of such keys depends on cryptographic algorithms based on mathematical problems to produce one-way functions. Effective security only requires keeping the private key private; the public key can be openly distributed without compromising security.

In such a system, any person can encrypt a message using the receiver's public key, but that encrypted message can only be decrypted with the receiver's private key.

Alice and Bob have two keys of their own --- just to be clear, that's four keys total. Each party has their own public key, which they share with the world, and their own private key which they well, which they keep private, of course but, more than that, which they keep as a closely guarded secret. The magic of public key cryptography is that a message encrypted with the public key can only be decrypted with the private key. Alice will encrypt her message with Bob's public key, and even though Eve knows she used Bob's public key, and even though Eve knows Bob's public key herself, she is unable to decrypt the message. Only Bob, using his secret key, can decrypt the message assuming he's kept it secret, of course.

Alice and Bob do not need to plan anything ahead of time to communicate securely: they generate their public-private key pairs independently, and happily broadcast their public keys to the world at large. Alice can rest assured that only Bob can decrypt the message she sends because she has encrypted it with his public key.