Format Preserving Encryption

Background

Our world runs on data. With the increase in digitization, more and more data is being generated, captured, and stored by different companies. Such a high volume of data warrants securing the same. There are different ways to protect the data like imposing role-based access controls, data encryption, etc. Data encryption protects digital data confidentiality as the data is transmitted between systems via the internet. There are various encryption techniques and algorithms. The intention of this article is to introduce you to the encryption technique which is not new but is relatively unknown to the developer community. Nevertheless, it is to this day even unknown to many seasoned cryptographers.

Format Preserving Encryption (FPE)

Format Preserving Encryption is as the name suggests, an encryption technique in which the format of the encrypted data is maintained. When a plaintext is encrypted with FPE, the ciphertext then has the same format as that of plaintext.
As per  NIST 800-38G Format-preserving encryption (FPE) is designed for data that is not necessarily binary. In particular, given any finite set of symbols, like the decimal numerals, a method for FPE transforms data that is formatted as a sequence of the symbols in such a way that the encrypted form of the data has the same format, including the length, as the original data. Thus, an FPE encrypted SSN would be a sequence of nine decimal digits.

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