Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Introduction to Cryptography
This work is based loosely on Chapter 12 (Number Theory) of the text Security is very important in IT, and a key aspect of this is privacy (or confidentiality) e.g. in credit card transactions on the internet We want secure communication, where only the sender & receiver of a message can understand it This is achieved by encrypting (or enciphering) the message at the sender site, & decrypting (or deciphering) it at the receiver site Hopefully, an intruder who obtains the encrypted message is unable to understand its contents 1
Caesars Cipher
A very early example of encryption is due to Julius Caesar (10044 BC) We call data that is not encrypted plaintext (or cleartext), while encrypted data is ciphertext Caesar encrypted his messages using the table
Plaintext a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z Ciphertext D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C
Thus discrete is encrypted as GLVFUHWH, and SULYDFB is decrypted as privacy This cipher is termed a monoalphabetic cipher, since each plaintext letter is always encrypted by 2 the same ciphertext letter
Multiplicative Ciphers
A cipher can also be obtained by multiplication by a number t, as follows To encipher a plaintext letter: 1. Encode the letter as its corresponding number 2. Multiply the number by t 3. Use the remainder when this number is divided by 26, and translate it back to a letter If t = 2, we obtain
Plaintext a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z Ciphertext B D F H J L N P R T V X Z B D F H J L N P R T V X Z
Note this is not a useful cipher, as the message 5 LRN could mean fig,fit,sit, etc
It can be checked that valid multiplicative ciphers are obtained if t = 1 (the trivial cipher), 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 15, 17, 19, 21, 23 and 25 so there are 12 multiplicative ciphers
6
Affine Ciphers
If a message is encrypted with an additive or multiplicative cipher, it would not take an intruder very long to discover the number s or t, and so break the cipher Thus these methods offer very limited security However, the two approaches can be combined: 1. Encode the plaintext letter as a number 2. Add s, and encode the resulting letter as a no. 3. Multiply this number by t, and interpret the result as the ciphertext letter The result is the affine cipher [s, t] e.g: w is encrypted as C in the cipher [8, 11] 7
(Diagram from Foundations of Computer Science by Behrouz A. Forouzan, Brooks/Cole, 2003, p. 308)
10
DES (continued)
In DES, the data is transformed into a string of bits (e.g. use ASCII code), which is broken into segments of 64 bits Each segment is then encrypted in a many-stage process that uses a 56-bit key The DES method is a monoalphabetic cipher, since, for a given key, each particular 64-bit plaintext segment is always encrypted as the same 64-bit ciphertext string
12