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In cryptography, a cipher is an algorithm for performing encryption or decryption—a series of well-defined steps that can be followed as a procedure. An alternative, less common term is encipherment. To encipher or encode is to convert information into cipher or code. In common parlance, "cipher" is synonymous with "code", as they are both a set of steps that encrypt a message; however, the concepts are distinct in cryptography, especially classical cryptography.
Claude Elwood Shannon was an American mathematician, electrical engineer, computer scientist and cryptographer known as the "father of information theory". He is credited alongside George Boole for laying the foundations of the Information Age.
Cryptanalysis refers to the process of analyzing information systems in order to understand hidden aspects of the systems. Cryptanalysis is used to breach cryptographic security systems and gain access to the contents of encrypted messages, even if the cryptographic key is unknown.
Information theory is the mathematical study of the quantification, storage, and communication of information. The field was originally established by the works of Harry Nyquist and Ralph Hartley, in the 1920s, and Claude Shannon in the 1940s. The field, in applied mathematics, is at the intersection of probability theory, statistics, computer science, statistical mechanics, information engineering, and electrical engineering.
In cryptography, the one-time pad (OTP) is an encryption technique that cannot be cracked, but requires the use of a single-use pre-shared key that is larger than or equal to the size of the message being sent. In this technique, a plaintext is paired with a random secret key. Then, each bit or character of the plaintext is encrypted by combining it with the corresponding bit or character from the pad using modular addition.
Kerckhoffs's principle of cryptography was stated by Dutch-born cryptographer Auguste Kerckhoffs in the 19th century. The principle holds that a cryptosystem should be secure, even if everything about the system, except the key, is public knowledge. This concept is widely embraced by cryptographers, in contrast to security through obscurity, which is not.
Warren Weaver was an American scientist, mathematician, and science administrator. He is widely recognized as one of the pioneers of machine translation and as an important figure in creating support for science in the United States.
Cryptography, the use of codes and ciphers to protect secrets, began thousands of years ago. Until recent decades, it has been the story of what might be called classical cryptography — that is, of methods of encryption that use pen and paper, or perhaps simple mechanical aids. In the early 20th century, the invention of complex mechanical and electromechanical machines, such as the Enigma rotor machine, provided more sophisticated and efficient means of encryption; and the subsequent introduction of electronics and computing has allowed elaborate schemes of still greater complexity, most of which are entirely unsuited to pen and paper.
In cryptography, confusion and diffusion are two properties of the operation of a secure cipher identified by Claude Shannon in his 1945 classified report A Mathematical Theory of Cryptography. These properties, when present, work together to thwart the application of statistics and other methods of cryptanalysis.
Gilbert Sandford Vernam was a Worcester Polytechnic Institute 1914 graduate and AT&T Bell Labs engineer who, in 1917, invented an additive polyalphabetic stream cipher and later co-invented an automated one-time pad cipher. Vernam proposed a teleprinter cipher in which a previously prepared key, kept on paper tape, is combined character by character with the plaintext message to produce the ciphertext. To decipher the ciphertext, the same key would be again combined character by character, producing the plaintext. Vernam later worked for the Postal Telegraph Company, and became an employee of Western Union when that company acquired Postal in 1943. His later work was largely with automatic switching systems for telegraph networks.
In cryptography, a product cipher combines two or more transformations in a manner intending that the resulting cipher is more secure than the individual components to make it resistant to cryptanalysis. The product cipher combines a sequence of simple transformations such as substitution (S-box), permutation (P-box), and modular arithmetic. The concept of product ciphers is due to Claude Shannon, who presented the idea in his foundational paper, Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems. A particular product cipher design where all the constituting transformation functions have the same structure is called an iterative cipher with the term "rounds" applied to the functions themselves.
A cryptosystem is considered to have information-theoretic security if the system is secure against adversaries with unlimited computing resources and time. In contrast, a system which depends on the computational cost of cryptanalysis to be secure is called computationally, or conditionally, secure.
"A Mathematical Theory of Communication" is an article by mathematician Claude E. Shannon published in Bell System Technical Journal in 1948. It was renamed The Mathematical Theory of Communication in the 1949 book of the same name, a small but significant title change after realizing the generality of this work. It has tens of thousands of citations which is rare for a scientific article and gave rise to the field of information theory. Scientific American referred to the paper as the "Magna Carta of the Information Age".
In cryptography, a semantically secure cryptosystem is one where only negligible information about the plaintext can be feasibly extracted from the ciphertext. Specifically, any probabilistic, polynomial-time algorithm (PPTA) that is given the ciphertext of a certain message , and the message's length, cannot determine any partial information on the message with probability non-negligibly higher than all other PPTA's that only have access to the message length. This concept is the computational complexity analogue to Shannon's concept of perfect secrecy. Perfect secrecy means that the ciphertext reveals no information at all about the plaintext, whereas semantic security implies that any information revealed cannot be feasibly extracted.
Below is a timeline of notable events related to cryptography.
Cryptography, or cryptology, is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adversarial behavior. More generally, cryptography is about constructing and analyzing protocols that prevent third parties or the public from reading private messages. Modern cryptography exists at the intersection of the disciplines of mathematics, computer science, information security, electrical engineering, digital signal processing, physics, and others. Core concepts related to information security are also central to cryptography. Practical applications of cryptography include electronic commerce, chip-based payment cards, digital currencies, computer passwords, and military communications.
The Bell Labs Technical Journal was the in-house scientific journal for scientists of Nokia Bell Labs, published yearly by the IEEE society.
Betty Shannon was a mathematician and the main research collaborator of Claude Shannon. Betty inspired and assisted Claude in building some of his most famous inventions.
In cryptography, a round or round function is a basic transformation that is repeated (iterated) multiple times inside the algorithm. Splitting a large algorithmic function into rounds simplifies both implementation and cryptanalysis.
References
- Shannon, Claude. "Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems", Bell System Technical Journal , vol. 28(4), page 656–715, 1949.
- Shannon, Claude. "A Mathematical Theory of Cryptography", Memorandum MM 45-110-02, Sept. 1, 1945, Bell Laboratories.
