Kruptos 2 professional uses industry standard techniques and unmodified algorithms to perform encryption on your files. At the time of writing all algorithms used are considered safe and unbroken. Kruptos 2 Professional uses the following algorithms to encrypt your files: AES in CBC mode and SHA256, the following techniques are also used during the encryption process: Key stretching, Salt and Key derivation functions.
What is encryption?
In cryptography, encryption is the process of transforming information (referred to as plaintext) using an algorithm (called cipher) to make it unreadable to anyone except those possessing special knowledge, usually referred to as a key. The result of the process is encrypted information (in cryptography, referred to as ciphertext). In many contexts, the word encryption also implicitly refers to the reverse process, decryption (e.g. “software for encryption” can typically also perform decryption), to make the encrypted information readable again (i.e. to make it unencrypted).
What is file encryption?
File system-level encryption, often called file or folder encryption, is a form of disk encryption where individual files or directories are encrypted by the file system itself. This is in contrast to full disk encryption where the entire partition or disk, in which the file system resides, is encrypted.
CBC Mode
CBC mode of operation was invented by IBM in 1976.[5] In the cipher-block chaining (CBC) mode, each block of plaintext is XORed with the previous ciphertext block before being encrypted. This way, each ciphertext block is dependent on all plaintext blocks processed up to that point. Also, to make each message unique, an initialization vector must be used in the first block
What is SHA-2?
In cryptography, SHA-2 is a set of cryptographic hash functions (SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, SHA-512) designed by the National Security Agency (NSA) and published in 2001 by the NIST as a U.S. Federal Information Processing Standard. SHA stands for Secure Hash Algorithm. SHA-2 includes a significant number of changes from its predecessor, SHA-1. SHA-2 consists of a set of four hash functions with digests that are 224, 256, 384 or 512 bits.
What is Key Stretching?
In cryptography, key stretching refers to techniques used to make a possibly weak key, typically a password or passphrase, more secure against a brute force attack by increasing the time it takes to test each possible key. Passwords or passphrases created by humans are often short or predictable enough to allow password cracking. Key stretching makes such attacks more difficult.
Salt?
In cryptography, a salt consists of random bits that are used as one of the inputs to a one-way function. The other input is usually a password or passphrase. The output of the one-way function can be stored rather than the password, and still be used to authenticate users. The one-way function typically uses a cryptographic hash function. A salt can also be combined with a password by a key derivation function such as PBKDF2 to generate a key for use with a cipher or other cryptographic algorithm.
Key derivation functions ?
Key derivation functions are often used in conjunction with non-secret parameters to derive one or more keys from a common secret value (which is sometimes also referred to as "key diversification"). Such use may prevent an attacker who obtains a derived key from learning useful information about either the input secret value or any of the other derived keys. A KDF may also be used to ensure that derived keys have other desirable properties, such as avoiding "weak keys" in some specific encryption systems.