Key stretching

In cryptography, key stretching techniques are 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.

Key stretching techniques generally work as follows. The initial key is fed into an algorithm that outputs an enhanced key. The enhanced key should be of sufficient size to make it infeasible to break by brute force (e.g. at least 128 bits). The overall algorithm used should be secure in the sense that there should be no known way of taking a shortcut that would make it possible to calculate the enhanced key with less processor work than by using the key stretching algorithm itself.

The key stretching process leaves the attacker with two options: either try every possible combination of the enhanced key (infeasible if the enhanced key is long enough), or else try likely combinations of the initial key. In the latter approach, if the initial key is a password or a passphrase, then the attacker would first try every word in a dictionary or common password list and then try all character combinations for longer passwords. Key stretching does not prevent this approach, but the attacker has to spend much more time on each attempt.

If the attacker uses the same class of hardware as the user, each guess will take the same amount of time to process as it took the user (for example, one second). Even if the attacker has much greater computing resources than the user, the key stretching will still slow the attacker down, since the user's computer only has to compute the stretching function once upon the user entering their password, whereas the attacker must compute it for every guess in the attack.

There are several ways to perform key stretching. A cryptographic hash function or a block cipher may be repeatedly applied in a loop. In applications where the key is used for a cipher, the key schedule in the cipher may be modified so that it takes a specific length of time to perform.

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