Overview #

Symmetric Key Cryptography Symmetric Key Cryptography is when an Encrypted message exchange using a Symmetric Key requires the use of the same key by all parties involved for both encryption and decryption.Symmetric Key Cryptography necessitates distributing the key to all participants.

Symmetric Key Cryptography allows all parties must trust each other, because they can read each other's messages.

Physical distribution of symmetric keys is the safest because an unencrypted electronic transmission of a key would be vulnerable to theft. Physical key distribution would make symmetric keys hard to use in an environment with a large number of users. Even with Physical distribution, the keys are still vulnerable to theft.

However, often some application uses a clever combination of encryption schemes to distribute symmetric keys over the network for background authentication.

Symmetric Key Cryptography LDAPWiki refers you to Wikipedia: Symmetric-key_algorithmSymmetric Key Cryptography Cryptographic Algorithms (sometimes known as secret-key algorithms) transform data in a way that is fundamentally difficult to undo without knowledge of a secret key. The key is symmetric because the same key is used for a encryption and decryption).

Symmetric keys are often known by more than one entity; however, the key shall not be disclosed to entities that are not authorized access to the data protected by that algorithm and secret-key. Symmetric Key Cryptography algorithms are used, for example,

• To provide data confidentiality; the same key is used to encrypt and decrypt data;
• To provide source and integrity authentication services in the form of Message Authentication Codes (MACs); the same key is used to generate the MAC and to validate it. MACs normally employ either a symmetric key-encryption algorithm or a cryptographic hash function as their cryptographic primitive;
• As part of the Key-Establishment process
• To generate deterministic random numbers

Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and ChaCha20 are the most popular Symmetric Key Cryptography methods. AES is a Block Cipher, with 128-bit block sizes. ChaCha20 is a Stream Cipher.

More Information#

There might be more information for this subject on one of the following:

• AES
• Best Practices OpenID Connect
• Best Practices for LDAP Security
• Cipher_suites
• Client Secret
• Cryptographic Algorithm
• Cryptographic Key
• Cryptographic Primitive
• Cryptography
• Diffie-Hellman or RSA
• DirXML PassSync Agent
• EMV Terms
• Enciphered PIN
• Encryption
• Glossary Of LDAP And Directory Terminology
• Hybrid cryptosystem
• Kerberos
• Key Encapsulation Method
• Key Generation
• Key wrapping
• NCP Primary Authentication Protocol
• Password Flow From Active Directory to eDirectory
• Private Key
• Public Key
• Secret-key
• Symmetric Key
• TLS 1.3
• Telegram
• Token

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• [#1] - Symmetric-key_algorithm - based on information obtained 2018-08-12-