Is there any benefit to encrypting twice using pgp? [closed]

Question

I am asking from a "more secure" perspective. I can imagine a scenario with two required private keys needed for decryption scenarios that may make this an attractive model. I believe it is not adding any additional security other than having to compromise two different private keys. I think that if it was any more secure than encrypting it one million times would be the best way to secure information.

Update a couple of years later: As Rasmus Faber points out 3DES encryption was added to extend the life of DES encryption which had widespread adoption. Encrypting twice using the same key suffers from the Meet in the Middle Attack while encrypting a third time does in fact offer greater security

Answer 1

I understand that it is more secure provided you use different keys. But don't take my word for it. I'm not a crypto-analyst. I don't even play one on TV.

The reason I understand it to be more secure is that you're using extra information for encoding (both multiple keys and an unknown number of keys (unless you publish the fact that there's two)).

Double encryption using the same key makes many codes easier to crack. I've heard this for some codes but I know it to be true for ROT13 :-)

I think the security scheme used by Kerberos is a better one than simple double encryption.

They actually have one master key whose sole purpose is to encrypt the session key and that's all the master key is used for. The session key is what's used to encrypt the real traffic and it has a limited lifetime. This has two advantages.

• Evil dudes don't have time to crack the session key since, by the time they've managed to do it, those session keys are no longer in use.
• Those same evil dudes don't get an opportunity to crack the master key simply because it's so rarely used (they would need a great many encrypted packets to crack the key).

But, as I said, take that with a big grain of salt. I don't work for the NSA. But then I'd have to tell you that even if I did work for the NSA. Oh, no, you won't crack me that easily, my pretty.

Semi-useful snippet: Kerberos (or Cerberus, depending on your lineage) is the mythological three-headed dog that guards the gates of Hell, a well-chosen mascot for that security protocol. That same dog is called Fluffy in the Harry Potter world (I once had a girlfriend whose massive German Shepherd dog was called Sugar, a similarly misnamed beast).

Answer 2

It is more secure, but not much. The analogy with physical locks is pretty good. By putting two physical locks of the same type on a door, you ensure that a thief that can pick one lock in five minutes now need to spend ten minutes. But you might be much better off by buying a lock that was twice as expensive, which the thief could not pick at all.

In cryptography it works much the same way: in the general case, you cannot ensure that encrypting twice makes it more than twice as hard to break the encryption. So if NSA normally can decrypt your message in five minutes, with double encryption, they need ten minutes. You would probably be much better off by instead doubling the length of the key, which might make them need 100 years to break the encryption.

In a few cases, it makes sense to repeat the encryption - but you need to work the math with the specific algorithm to prove it. For instance, Triple-DES is basically DES repeated three times with three different keys (except that you encrypt-decrypt-encrypt, instead of just encrypting three times). But this also shows how unintuitive this works, because while Triple-DES triples the number of encryptions, it only has double the effective key-length of the DES algorithm.

Answer 3

Encryption with multiple keys is more secure than encryption with a single key, it's common sense.

My vote is that it is not adding any additional security

No.

other than having to compromise two different private keys.

Yes, but you see, if you encrypt something with two ciphers, each using a different key, and one of the ciphers are found to be weak and can be cracked, the second cipher also must be weak for the attacker to recover anything.

Answer 4

Double encryption does not increase the security.

There are two modes of using PGP: asymmetric (public key, with a private key to decrypt), and symmetric (with a passphrase). With either mode the message is encrypted with a session key, which is typically a randomly generated 128-bit number. The session key is then encrypted with the passphrase or with the public key.

There are two ways that the message can be decrypted. One is if the session key can be decryped. This is going to be either a brute-force attack on the passphrase or by an adversary that has your private key. The second way is an algorithmic weakness.

If the adversary can get your private key, then if you have two private keys the adversary will get both.

If the adversary can brute-force your passphrase or catch it with a keystroke logger, then the adversary can almost certainly get both of them.

If there is an algorithmic weakness, then it can be exploited twice.

So although it may seem like double encryption helps, in practice it does not help against any realistic threat.