History of cryptography

Summary

Cryptography, the use of codes and ciphers to protect secrets, began thousands of years ago. Until recent decades, it has been the story of what might be called classical cryptography — that is, of methods of encryption that use pen and paper, or perhaps simple mechanical aids. In the early 20th century, the invention of complex mechanical and electromechanical machines, such as the Enigma rotor machine, provided more sophisticated and efficient means of encryption; and the subsequent introduction of electronics and computing has allowed elaborate schemes of still greater complexity, most of which are entirely unsuited to pen and paper. The development of cryptography has been paralleled by the development of cryptanalysis — the "breaking" of codes and ciphers. The discovery and application, early on, of frequency analysis to the reading of encrypted communications has, on occasion, altered the course of history. Thus the Zimmermann Telegram triggered the United States' entry into

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_cryptography

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Modern cryptography pushed forward the need of having provable security. Whereas ancient cryptography was only relying on heuristic assumptions and the secrecy of the designs, nowadays researchers try to make the security of schemes to rely on mathematical problems which are believed hard to solve. When doing these proofs, the capabilities of potential adversaries are modeled formally. For instance, the black-box model assumes that an adversary does not learn anything from the inner-state of a construction. While this assumption makes sense in some practical scenarios, it was shown that one can sometimes learn some information by other means, e.g., by timing how long the computation take. In this thesis, we focus on two different areas of cryptography. In both parts, we take first a theoretical point of view to obtain a result. We try then to adapt our results so that they are easily usable for implementers and for researchers working in practical cryptography. In the first part of this thesis, we take a look at post-quantum cryptography, i.e., at cryptographic primitives that are believed secure even in the case (reasonably big) quantum computers are built. We introduce HELEN, a new public-key cryptosystem based on the hardness of the learning from parity with noise problem (LPN). To make our results more concrete, we suggest some practical instances which make the system easily implementable. As stated above, the design of cryptographic primitives usually relies on some well-studied hard problems. However, to suggest concrete parameters for these primitives, one needs to know the precise complexity of algorithms solving the underlying hard problem. In this thesis, we focus on two recent hard-problems that became very popular in post-quantum cryptography: the learning with error (LWE) and the learning with rounding problem (LWR). We introduce a new algorithm that solves both problems and provide a careful complexity analysis so that these problems can be used to construct practical cryptographic primitives. In the second part, we look at leakage-resilient cryptography which studies adversaries able to get some side-channel information from a cryptographic primitive. In the past, two main disjoint models were considered. The first one, the threshold probing model, assumes that the adversary can put a limited number of probes in a circuit. He then learns all the values going through these probes. This model was used mostly by theoreticians as it allows very elegant and convenient proofs. The second model, the noisy-leakage model, assumes that every component of the circuit leaks but that the observed signal is noisy. Typically, some Gaussian noise is added to it. According to experiments, this model depicts closely the real behaviour of circuits. Hence, this model is cherished by the practical cryptographic community. In this thesis, we show that making a proof in the first model implies a proof in the second model which unifies the two models and reconciles both communities. We then look at this result with a more practical point-of-view. We show how it can help in the process of evaluating the security of a chip based solely on the more standard mutual information metric.

EPFL2015