A cryptosystem is considered to have information-theoretic security (also called unconditional 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 (and thus can be broken by an attack with unlimited computation) is called computationally, or conditionally, secure.
An encryption protocol with information-theoretic security is impossible to break even with infinite computational power. Protocols proven to be information-theoretically secure are resistant to future developments in computing. The concept of information-theoretically secure communication was introduced in 1949 by American mathematician Claude Shannon, one of the founders of classical information theory, who used it to prove the one-time pad system was secure. Information-theoretically secure cryptosystems have been used for the most sensitive governmental communications, such as diplomatic cables and high-level military communications .
There are a variety of cryptographic tasks for which information-theoretic security is a meaningful and useful requirement. A few of these are:
Secret sharing schemes such as Shamir's are information-theoretically secure (and also perfectly secure) in that having less than the requisite number of shares of the secret provides no information about the secret.
More generally, secure multiparty computation protocols often have information-theoretic security.
Private information retrieval with multiple databases can be achieved with information-theoretic privacy for the user's query.
Reductions between cryptographic primitives or tasks can often be achieved information-theoretically. Such reductions are important from a theoretical perspective because they establish that primitive can be realized if primitive can be realized.
Symmetric encryption can be constructed under an information-theoretic notion of security called entropic security, which assumes that the adversary knows almost nothing about the message being sent.
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This course reviews some failure cases in public-key cryptography. It introduces some cryptanalysis techniques. It also presents fundamentals in cryptography such as interactive proofs. Finally, it pr
This course provides an overview of information security and privacy topics. It introduces students to the knowledge and tools they will need to deal with the security/privacy challenges they are like
Text, sound, and images are examples of information sources stored in our computers and/or communicated over the Internet. How do we measure, compress, and protect the informatin they contain?
Cryptography, or cryptology (from κρυπτός "hidden, secret"; and γράφειν graphein, "to write", or -λογία -logia, "study", respectively), 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.
Quantum cryptography is the science of exploiting quantum mechanical properties to perform cryptographic tasks. The best known example of quantum cryptography is quantum key distribution which offers an information-theoretically secure solution to the key exchange problem. The advantage of quantum cryptography lies in the fact that it allows the completion of various cryptographic tasks that are proven or conjectured to be impossible using only classical (i.e. non-quantum) communication.
A chosen-plaintext attack (CPA) is an attack model for cryptanalysis which presumes that the attacker can obtain the ciphertexts for arbitrary plaintexts. The goal of the attack is to gain information that reduces the security of the encryption scheme. Modern ciphers aim to provide semantic security, also known as ciphertext indistinguishability under chosen-plaintext attack, and they are therefore, by design, generally immune to chosen-plaintext attacks if correctly implemented.
Information theory has allowed us to determine the fundamental limit of various communication and algorithmic problems, e.g., the channel coding problem, the compression problem, and the hypothesis testing problem. In this work, we revisit the assumptions ...
Succinct zero knowledge proofs (i.e. zkSNARKs) are powerful cryptographic tools that enable a prover to convince a verifier that a given statement is true without revealing any additional information. Their attractive privacy properties have led to much ac ...
Berkeley2023
In this paper we characterize all 2n-bit-to-n-bit Pseudorandom Functions (PRFs) constructed with the minimum number of calls to n-bit-to-n-bit PRFs and arbitrary number of linear functions. First, we show that all two-round constructions are either classic ...