I was wondering how to determine if an email that is sent is asymmetrically encrypted or symmetrically encrypted? asked 09 Feb '14, 20:11  ihavenoidea |
One Answer:
There is no way to detect that just by looking at the encrypted data, as both symmetric and asymmetric encryption produce 'random looking' bytes sequences. So, you need to know how the e-mail was encrypted. Sometimes you can deduce that from information included in the encryption framework (PGP or S/MIME) or the protocol (TLS). If you can post the capture somwhere (Google drive, dropbox, cloudshark.org) I will give some hints where to look for that information. I won't give the full answer for the homework!! Regards answered 09 Feb '14, 23:51  Kurt Knochner ♦ edited 09 Feb '14, 23:53 |
I am taking a network security class. We are given these packet captures and asked if it is asymmetric or symmetric encryption. I spent a few hours staring at each packet and have come no close to understanding it.