Cryptography Questions Medium
The Electronic Codebook (ECB) mode is a basic encryption mode used in cryptography. It is a block cipher mode where each block of plaintext is encrypted independently using the same encryption key. In ECB mode, the same plaintext block will always produce the same ciphertext block, making it deterministic.
The encryption process in ECB mode involves dividing the plaintext into fixed-size blocks and encrypting each block individually using the encryption algorithm. The resulting ciphertext blocks are then concatenated to form the complete ciphertext.
However, one of the main drawbacks of ECB mode is that it does not provide confidentiality for identical plaintext blocks. If the same plaintext block appears multiple times in the message, it will be encrypted into the same ciphertext block, which can potentially leak information to an attacker. Additionally, ECB mode does not provide any form of error propagation, meaning that a single bit error in the ciphertext will only affect the corresponding block in the decrypted plaintext.
Due to these limitations, ECB mode is generally not recommended for secure encryption purposes. It is often used in situations where confidentiality is not a primary concern, such as encrypting small amounts of data or when the plaintext blocks are guaranteed to be unique.