Beard Song
1 month, 2 weeks ago — 0 Comments — Permalink
Null Key Encryption
1 year, 3 months ago — 0 Comments — Permalink
Whilst watching The Dark Knight for the nth time yesterday, I noticed a subtle bit of geek humour. Towards the end of the film, Batman mentions:
“The database is Null Key Encrypted, it can only be accessed by one person”
That sounds perfectly reasonable, right? Wrong - Null Key Encryption (defined in RFC 2410) is a particularly light form of encryption that does nothing to obfuscate the data - its purpose is to provide the option of providing no encryption where it is mandatory, such as in IPSec ESP which always specifies an encryption type. The authors of RFC 2410 have a bit of fun with this idea in their paper, incorporating trivial maths and test vectors. Nice try - but it doesn’t beat RFC 2549.
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