Cryptography Reference
In-Depth Information
that is not known to the wire-tapper. (Otherwise, the wire-tapper can
decrypt the ciphertext exactly as done by the receiver.) This extra
knowledge may take the form of the decryption algorithm itself, or some
parameters and/or auxiliary inputs used by the decryption algorithm.
We call this extra knowledge the decryption-key . Note that, without loss
of generality, we may assume that the decryption algorithm is known
to the wire-tapper, and that the decryption algorithm operates on two
inputs: a ciphertext and a decryption-key. We stress that the existence
of a decryption-key, not known to the wire-tapper, is merely a necessary
condition for secret communication. The above description implicitly
presupposes the existence of an ecient algorithm for generating (ran-
dom) keys.
Evaluating the “security” of an encryption scheme is a very tricky
business. A preliminary task is to understand what is “security” (i.e., to
properly define what is meant by this intuitive term). Two approaches
to defining security are known. The first (“classical”) approach, intro-
duced by Shannon (119), is information theoretic . It is concerned with
the “information” about the plaintext that is “present” in the cipher-
text . Loosely speaking, if the ciphertext contains information about
the plaintext then the encryption scheme is considered insecure. It has
been shown that such high (i.e., “perfect”) level of security can be
achieved only if the key in use is at least as long as the total amount
of information sent via the encryption scheme (119). This fact (i.e.,
that the key has to be longer than the information exchanged using
it) is indeed a drastic limitation on the applicability of such (perfectly-
secure) encryption schemes.
The second (“modern”) approach, followed in the current text, is
based on computational complexity . This approach is based on the the-
sis that it does not matter whether the ciphertext contains information
about the plaintext, but rather whether this information can be e-
ciently extracted . In other words, instead of asking whether it is possible
for the wire-tapper to extract specific information, we ask whether it is
feasible for the wire-tapper to extract this information. It turns out that
the new (i.e., “computational complexity”) approach can offer security
even when the key is much shorter than the total length of the messages
sent via the encryption scheme.
 
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