Cryptography

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. Core concepts related to information security (data confidentiality, data integrity, authentication, and non-repudiation) are also central to cryptography. Practical applications of cryptography include electronic commerce, chip-based payment cards, digital currencies, computer passwords, and military communications. Cryptography prior to the modern age was effectively synonymous with encryption, converting readable information (plaintext) to unintelligible nonsense text (ciphertext), which can only be read by reversing the process (decryption). The sender of an encrypted (coded) message shares the decryption (decoding) technique only with the intended recipients to preclude access from adversaries. The cryptography literature often uses the names "Alice" (or "A") for the sender, "Bob" (or "B") for the intended recipient, and "Eve" (or "E") for the eavesdropping adversary. Since the development of rotor cipher machines in World War I and the advent of computers in World War II, cryptography methods have become increasingly complex and their applications more varied. Modern cryptography is heavily based on mathematical theory and computer science practice; cryptographic algorithms are designed around computational hardness assumptions, making such algorithms hard to break in actual practice by any adversary. While it is theoretically possible to break into a well-designed system, it is infeasible in actual practice to do so.

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Attacks on some post-quantum cryptographic protocols: The case of the Legendre PRF and SIKE

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Post-quantum cryptography is a branch of cryptography which deals with cryptographic algorithms whose hardness assumptions are not based on problems known to be solvable by a quantum computer, such as

EPFL2022

Six shades lighter: a bit-serial implementation of the AES family

Subhadeep Banik, Muhammed Fatih Balli, Sergio Roldán Lombardía

Recently, cryptographic literature has seen new block cipher designs such as PRESENT, GIFT or SKINNY that aim to be more lightweight than the current standard, i.e., AES. Even though AES family of blo

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Complete Practical Side-Channel-Assisted Reverse Engineering of AES-Like Ciphers

Andrea Felice Caforio, Subhadeep Banik, Muhammed Fatih Balli

Public knowledge about the structure of a cryptographic system is a standard assumption in the literature and algorithms are expected to guarantee security in a setting where only the encryption key i

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COM-309: Quantum information processing

Information is processed in physical devices. In the quantum regime the concept of classical bit is replaced by the quantum bit. We introduce quantum principles, and then quantum communications, key d

CS-721: Privacy at the communication layer

In this seminar course students will get in depth understanding of mechanisms for private communication. This will be done by reading important papers that will be analyzed in the class. Students will

COM-401: Cryptography and security

This course introduces the basics of cryptography. We review several types of cryptographic primitives, when it is safe to use them and how to select the appropriate security parameters. We detail how

Covers the fundamentals of cryptography, including symmetric encryption, digital signatures, and secure communication standards.

Explores the fundamentals of cryptography, its properties, historical development, and potential challenges from quantum computers.

Covers advanced cryptography topics and key concepts for safe communication.

Pre-shared key

In cryptography, a pre-shared key (PSK) is a shared secret which was previously shared between the two parties using some secure channel before it needs to be used. To build a key from shared secret, the key derivation function is typically used. Such systems almost always use symmetric key cryptographic algorithms. The term PSK is used in Wi-Fi encryption such as Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP), Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA), where the method is called WPA-PSK or WPA2-PSK, and also in the Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP), where it is known as EAP-PSK.

Stream cipher

A stream cipher is a symmetric key cipher where plaintext digits are combined with a pseudorandom cipher digit stream (keystream). In a stream cipher, each plaintext digit is encrypted one at a time with the corresponding digit of the keystream, to give a digit of the ciphertext stream. Since encryption of each digit is dependent on the current state of the cipher, it is also known as state cipher. In practice, a digit is typically a bit and the combining operation is an exclusive-or (XOR).

MD5CRK

In cryptography, MD5CRK was a volunteer computing effort (similar to distributed.net) launched by Jean-Luc Cooke and his company, CertainKey Cryptosystems, to demonstrate that the MD5 message digest algorithm is insecure by finding a collision - two messages that produce the same MD5 hash. The project went live on March 1, 2004. The project ended on August 24, 2004 after researchers independently demonstrated a technique for generating collisions in MD5 using analytical methods by Xiaoyun Wang, Feng, Xuejia Lai, and Yu.