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Concept
Information-theoretic security
Summary
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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