Cryptography Unchained - BeeBryte (White Paper)

Maxime LAHARRAGUE, Pierre-Jean LARPIN, Johanna DREANO May 30, 2018
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Cryptography Unchained
Cryptography
Unchained
10 min

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In a world where the flow of information is
increasing exponentially, it becomes essential to have
powerful tools to ensure security features in terms of
data exchange and storage (such as authenticity,
integrity, confidentiality…). Among the available tools,
the "BlockChain" focuses today all the attention and
passions.
As a particularly complex mathematical
construction, and a subject of many articles and books,
BlockChain could deeply transform many sectors and
appears as an essential component of the development
of tomorrow’s communication network. Its "basic
bricks" are quite old and belong to the vast and
fascinating field of cryptography. In this article, we
propose to go back to the roots and explore this
science of secrecy.
Very early in the development of its energy
intelligence & automation solution, our company
BeeBryte got interested in the cryptographic processes
and technologies that lay the foundations of the
security of any information system (confidentiality,
authenticity and integrity). Used separately or in
combination, these technologies are already largely
integrated into our SaaS, especially to protect
communications between our IoT gateway (Box) and
our Cloud-based platform against cyber-attacks.
Cryptography is a discipline that aims at
protecting the integrity and authenticity of a message
as well as its privacy from third-party intrusions. Used
in a vast range of areas, cryptography covers many
features, on top of which the secure transmission of
data (encryption), the generation of secrets between
users, the authentication (or signature) of a message,
and even its protection against any alteration.
Our wish here is to present some functional
components, which are essential to the
implementation of cryptographic protocols, such as
those underlying the BlockChain.
We will not go into detail about the complex
mathematical theories underpinning the exposed
tools. Globally, they rely on operations, which are
relatively simple to perform but extremely difficult to
reverse, except resorting to "brute force", i.e. the
systematic exploration of wide combinations, limited
by the available computing power. We invite the
reader interested in exploring the underlying
mathematics to further his searches on his own.
KEY CONCEPTS
Symmetric Encryption – AES algorithm
Symmetric encryption’s basic concept relies on
the sharing of a common key between interlocutors.
This key is used by the sender to encrypt his message,
which can only be decrypted by using this same key,
that only the recipient and the sender of the message
are familiar with.
The encryption algorithm makes it possible to
transform plain text into blocks which remain
incomprehensible without the key. However, these
algorithms have the major disadvantage of requiring
the prior – confidential – sharing of a common key. This
drawback can however be overcome with the help of
techniques such as the Diffie-Hellman key exchange
protocol.
The most commonly used symmetric
encryption algorithm is the Advanced Encryption
Standard (AES), notably adopted by the NSA in the
United States. This algorithm defines a number of
transformations dedicated to be carried out on data
stored in a table. The length of the key (128, 192 or
256-bit) determines the strength of the encryption.
Illustration of a typical use case:
• Bob wants to send a message to Alice, with whom
he shares a secret that they will use as the

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encryption key. They take good care not to
communicate this key to any other third party.
• Bob encrypts the message using the encryption key,
and then sends the encrypted message to Alice.
• By also using the encryption key, Alice is able to
decrypt the message she receives, and accesses
successfully to the initial message from Bob.
Asymmetric encryption - RSA Algorithm
In asymmetric encryption, each user has a pair
of keys: a public key, broadcasted to all users, and a
private key known only to him. Each message
encrypted by one of the two keys can only be
decrypted with the other key constituting the pair.
Because of the high computational complexity
of symmetric encryption algorithms, they are typically
used to encrypt small amounts of data. The asymmetric
encryption is mainly used in 2 situations:
• To certify the identity of the message sender
Let’s consider the case where Bob wants to
transmit a message and ensures to the recipient
that he is the author. By encrypting the message
with his private key, Bob creates a digital signature
that is specific to him. Anyone can decipher his
message using Bob’s public key and thus confirm
that the message is from Bob. Indeed, the use of
another public key would return a wrong message.
• To send protected content to a specific recipient
This time, Bob wants to send a message to
Alice while ensuring that she will be the only one
able to read it. By encrypting his message with the
public key of Alice, Bob ensures that only Alice, the
unique holder of the associated private key, will
decrypt and read it.
Hash Functions
In cryptography, hash functions are
mathematical functions that take as input any type of
data and generate a code (the hash) of fixed length,
representative of the input data.
A hash function has several unique properties
that make it a useful tool for diverse applications in
computer security:
• It is deterministic: for a given input value, the hash
function will always return the same output.
Therefore, the hash can be seen as a signature of
fixed size of a message… but a non-exclusive
signature.
• In fact, several different messages can have the
same hash, but the probability of collisions (i.e. the
probability that two different messages have the
same hash) is extremely low.
This property allows you to authenticate a message:
if one knows the hash (or signature) of a message
and that it receives independently a copy of this
message, after calculation of its hash and positive
comparison with the signature, the authenticity of
the received message is quasi certain.
• A hash function is generally very sensitive to initial
conditions: the slightest modification of the content
input produces a totally different hash. This
property allows – in addition to authentication – to
ensure the integrity of a message, since the smallest
alteration will dramatically invalid its hash.

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• It is not directly invertible: calculating the hash
corresponding to a given message is easy, but the
opposite way, that is: to find a message that
corresponds to a hash, is not possible by any direct
calculation. The only solution is to ‘chop’ or hash, in
a systematic way, different messages until falling on
the expected hash, this method being physically
limited by available computing capacity.
Illustration of a typical use case:
• Bob wants to send a message to Alice and wants to
ensure that the content of his message is not
altered during the transmission.
• Alice, on the other hand, wants to ensure that the
message she receives is exactly what Bob wanted
to send her.
• Bob hashes the message that he wants to send to
Alice. He sends his message as well as the
corresponding hash.
• When she receives the message, Alice reads the
plain text message from Bob, and hashes it on her
side. By comparing this hash to the hash Bob
transmitted, she is able to determine whether or
not the message she just read has been corrupted
during the transmission.
Conclusion
The few elementary cryptographic techniques
that we have outlined in this article constitute the basic
components from which are developed more complex
systems such as the BlockChain but can (and must) also
be considered individually as means to address a large
number of features for securing data.
This perspective appeared to us as essential to
further dispassionately discuss the potential
applications of the BlockChain to the energy sector,
with their strengths and potentials but also their
constraints and relevance limits.
BeeBryte is using IoT, AI and BlockChain to get
commercial buildings, factories, EV charging stations or
entire eco-suburbs to consume electricity in a smarter,
more efficient and cheaper way while reducing carbon
footprint! BeeBryte is based in France and Singapore,
and is accelerated by Intel & TechFounders. Since its
creation in 2015, BeeBryte's solutions have been
awarded by prestigious organizations, such as EDF
Pulse, DENA Start-up Energy Transition award & Hello
Tomorrow Challenge.
If you want to participate in the energy revolution,
please contact us at:
contact@beebryte.com
www.twitter.com/BeeBryteGroup
www.beebryte.com

Cryptography Unchained - BeeBryte (White Paper)

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