Cryptography Reference
In-Depth Information
Glossary
AES
Advanced Encryption Standard. The successor of DES accepted in 2001. It is the
Belgian
Rijndael
algorithm discussed in Section 5.5.
Altavista
Popular Internet search engine (
www.altavista.com
). Though Google has
meanwhile 'taken' the market, its search syntax is weaker than Altavista's. Another
place to find material on cryptology is Wikipedia.
Anonymous remailer
A computer (or better, a mail node) used for forwarding emails,
which automatically strips sender information. There are pseudo-remailers that
keep the true sender address stored locally (so that it can be given to the police),
and real remailers, which prevent the path from being traced back, even if the
remailer operator is extorted.
Asymmetric encryption
(aka
public-key method
) An encryption method that uses
two keys. The public key is used for encryption, whereas the private key is used
for decryption. Asymmetric methods are used for encryption in general,
and
for
session-key exchange in symmetric methods,
and
for authentication, especially
for digital signatures (Sections 4.5 and 6.3).
Attacker
A person who uses a software program and/or corresponding hardware to
eavesdrop on communications, forge data, or pretend to be somebody else. A con-
ventional attacker replays an encrypted message and decrypts it later. An attacker
can also be a program running in the background, which collects passwords within
a local network automatically for somebody to evaluate them.
