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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
Caesar’s Cipher
• A very early example of encryption is due to
Julius Caesar (100–44 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
the same ciphertext letter 2
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Discrete Mathematics 2002 Lecture 35, 17-October-2002
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
‘LRN’ could mean ‘fig’,‘fit’,‘sit’, etc 5
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Discrete Mathematics 2002 Lecture 35, 17-October-2002
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
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Discrete Mathematics 2002 Lecture 35, 17-October-2002
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
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Discrete Mathematics 2002 Lecture 35, 17-October-2002