Monday, June 30, 2003

Sign then Encrypt or Encrypt then Sign?




I was doing some research online at work today, trying to optimize
some of the security infrastructure I’ve been working on for my client. I ran
across this article in
my search to remember whether, when both signing and encrypting a message, one is
supposed to sign first or encrypt first. I knew that doing it one way was bad, but
couldn’t remember which was which.



The article goes on at length about the many issues around signature
and encryption, but I mostly want to point out the first part, where it talks about
why you should always sign first, then encrypt second.



2 comments:

  1. Generally approach is to sign first and encrypt signed content. But both may have flaws (read Don Davis paper "Defective Sign & Encrypt in SMIME, PKCS#7, MOSS, PEM, PGP and XML" at http://world.std.com/~dtd/)

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  2. Or follow the link in the entry. ;)

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