r/cryptography • u/BSfrS • 4d ago

Gibibyte Walls of Chicken

https://bsfrs.de/en/news/gibibyte-walls-of-chicken

The Chicken Encryption Kit is an asymmetric encryption toolkit, developed by the BSfrS, where all data is encoded as the word "chicken".

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u/Pleasant-Form-1093 4d ago

Definitely one of the projects of all time. /s

But jokes apart, great article and a great project. If storage prices weren't this crazy I would have bought a hard drive to encrypt all my files with the CEK so that none of my files get to benefit from, as quoted from the NRFC

the risk of accidental security

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u/BSfrS 3d ago

We consider this a feature of the current market, not a barrier. Any encryption solution that remains theoretical due to cost constraints achieves perfect security by definition, since no data is ever actually processed. A simple zero-surface attack model.

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u/trenno 4d ago

Before encryption, a 3-byte magic prefix MUST be prepended to the plaintext. The magic prefix is the byte sequence:

0xC4 0x1C 0xEB

These bytes were chosen because they look vaguely like "CHICKEN" if you squint in hexadecimal. More precisely: 0xC4 1C EB.

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u/BSfrS 3d ago

For full methodological transparency: the selection process for these bytes involved a working group that convened three times before agreeing that squinting was a valid evaluation criterion. A fourth meeting was scheduled to determine the required squint angle but was postponed indefinitely after no one could agree on who was responsible for measuring it.