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Project Elysium

Project Elysium is my first cryptography project and is meant to be the implementation of my strict 2 party communication protocol.

Deep dive into the protocol

Here is a structured outline of the protocol (nothing too fancy):

  1. Diffie-Hellman: Both parties use diffie-hellman to establish a shared key which will be used later in the communication to validate both authenticity and integrity.
  2. Symmetric communication: Now that both parties have established a shared secret and therefore a secure channel they can continue their communication using symmetric encryption schemes like AES.

Measures against MiTM

The biggest logical flaw of this protocol is the potential for an active eavesdropper to intercept and manipulate the public key exchange sequence.
If such an interception is carried out successfully, it compromises the entirety of the communication sequence, undermining both the authenticity and the integrity of the messages.

In an attempt to overcome the aforementioned vulnerability, the protocol relies on trusted anchors, secondary secure channels to be exact.
Both parties are given a (Bubble Babble)[https://bohwaz.net/archives/web/Bubble_Babble.html] encoded version of their pulic key which is then securely exchanged via a secondary channel.
Upon receipt of the other party's public key, the protocol recalculates the fingerprint (utilizing SHA-256 and subsequently Bubble Babble one-way encoding) of the received key and presents it to the user for verification.
This approach delegates the responsibility of verification to the user, providing a robust countermeasure against potential adversaries.

Advantages/Disadvantages

  • E2E: The data are end-to-end encrypted and are/can only be decrypted when they reach the other party.
  • Hybrid encryption: The protocol utilizes both symmetric (AES) and assymetric (RSA) encryption schemes to increase security.
  • Authenticity and integrity: This protocol ensures authenticity and integrity for the vast majority* of the communication
  • Confidentiality: This is a result of the 2 party communication scheme described below.
  • Strict 2 party communication. It's not a bug its a feature!
    This unusual way of communication reduces the attack surface area and therefore eliminates
    a lot of vulnerabilities and also keeps things simple for further development/maintenance. The two parties enjoy more privacy because there are fewer intermediaries involved in the exchange of information.
  • Efficiency: Direct communications between two parties can be more efficient bandwidth wise.