Editing Encryption (section)

== Attacks and countermeasures ==

Encryption is an important tool but is not sufficient alone to ensure the [[Information security|security]] or [[Information privacy|privacy]] of sensitive information throughout its lifetime. Most applications of encryption protect information only at rest or in transit, leaving sensitive data in clear text and potentially vulnerable to improper disclosure during processing, such as by a [[Cloud computing|cloud]] service for example. [[Homomorphic encryption]] and [[secure multi-party computation]] are emerging techniques to compute encrypted data; these techniques are general and [[Turing completeness|Turing complete]] but incur high computational and/or communication costs.

In response to encryption of data at rest, cyber-adversaries have developed new types of attacks. These more recent threats to encryption of data at rest include cryptographic attacks,<ref>{{cite web |others=Discussion of encryption weaknesses for petabyte scale datasets |url=https://www.ssrc.ucsc.edu/Papers/li-fast13.pdf |website=www.ssrc.ucsc.edu |title=Horus: Fine-Grained Encryption-Based Security for Large-Scale Storage |author=Yan Li |author2=Nakul Sanjay Dhotre |author3=Yasuhiro Ohara |author4=Thomas M. Kroeger |author5=Ethan L. Miller |author6=Darrell D. E. Long}}</ref> [[Ciphertext stealing|stolen ciphertext attacks]],<ref>{{Cite web |url=https://robertheaton.com/2013/07/29/padding-oracle-attack/ |title=The Padding Oracle Attack – why crypto is terrifying|website=Robert Heaton |access-date=2016-12-25}}</ref> attacks on encryption keys,<ref>{{Cite news |url=https://arstechnica.com/security/2016/08/researchers-crack-open-unusually-advanced-malware-that-hid-for-5-years/ |title=Researchers crack open unusually advanced malware that hid for 5 years |newspaper=Ars Technica |access-date=2016-12-25}}</ref> [[Insider threat|insider attacks]], data corruption or integrity attacks,<ref>{{Cite news|url=https://arstechnica.com/security/2016/08/new-attack-steals-private-crypto-keys-by-corrupting-data-in-computer-memory/|title=New cloud attack takes full control of virtual machines with little effort|newspaper=Ars Technica|access-date=2016-12-25}}</ref> data destruction attacks, and [[ransomware]] attacks. Data fragmentation<ref>Examples of data fragmentation technologies include [[Tahoe-LAFS]] and [https://storj.io/index.html Storj].</ref> and [[Active Defense|active defense]]<ref>{{Cite web |title=Moving Target Defense (MTD) – NIST CSRC Glossary |url=https://csrc.nist.gov/glossary/term/moving_target_defense |publisher=National Institute of Standards and Technology |access-date=2025-04-24}}</ref> data protection technologies attempt to counter some of these attacks, by distributing, moving, or mutating ciphertext so it is more difficult to identify, steal, corrupt, or destroy.<ref>[https://www.cryptomove.com CryptoMove] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210206131311/https://www.cryptomove.com/ |date=2021-02-06 }} is the first technology to continuously move, mutate, and re-encrypt ciphertext as a form of data protection.</ref>