Cryptography Reference
In-Depth Information
[57]). It took nearly two decades for this one to be broken, but it was cracked
in 2001 by S. Vaudenay (see [285]). It sometimes takes many years for attacks
to be developed so that a given cryptosystem will succumb, and the knapsack
family is a good example. Chor-Rivest was the last-standing secure knapsack
cryptosystem, so now they are chiefly of theoretical interest.
What made all of the above not just possible, but rather a
necessity
—
that good old
mother of invention
— was the advent of the
Internet
. While
information secrecy, as we have seen throughout history, was strictly the purview
of governments and their agents, the Internet, and its associated e-mail, and
e-commerce activities, demanded a mechanism for the ordinary citizen to have
their
privacy concerns addressed. We now have
personal identification numbers
(PIN)s to identify ourselves to
automated teller machines
(ATM)s as well as to
engage in banking on secure Web pages, all of which use public-key cryptography
to guarantee that credit cards, banking, and other sensitive personal data travels
securely to the intended target. Few of us actually understand the mechanisms
behind all of these protocols that we use every day (although this topic will
foster that understanding), yet cryptography has become everybody's business,
hence everybody's concern. Therefore it is almost a personal duty that each of
us learn as much as possible about the underlying mechanisms that affect our
security, our privacy, and therefore our well-being.
Wireless telephones and e-mail traQc are notoriously insecure. Anyone with
minimal technology can “listen in” on electronic and voice conversations. There
are ways to ensure privacy in these matters and we are going to learn about
them.
By the mid-1990s, we had the standardization of digital signature algorithms
such as the
Digital Signature Standard
(DSS), and Internet cryptographic algo-
rithms for protecting e-commerce, such as Rivest's
RC4
algorithm, and others
about which we will learn the details later. There is much information for us to
process.
The Future
By the time the light of the twenty-first century shone upon us, we had the
new AES, and a promise of outstanding, if not, incredible possibilities for the
future. We will learn all about
smart cards
, including methods for storing your
medical data in such a fashion that if you were in an accident, the information on
the card could save your life. We will learn about secure methods of protecting
medical data bases, as well. There are numerous levels and types of cards, all
of which will be our tools and we will understand them. As well, there is the
area of
biometrics
such as fingerprints, eye retina scans, voice patterns, and
facial geometry, that can be used for identification, including fighting terrorism.
All will be ours to understand and appreciate. Then there is the realm of the
fantastic, what has not yet come to pass, but which has the potential to do so.
Quantum cryptography
means the
possibility
of using quantum mechanical
properties of subatomic particles to give us encryption on a scale that, if it
ever came into being, would eliminate all classical symmetric and asymmetric
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