Cryptography: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 04:19, 8 June 2003

Revision as of 10:23, 13 June 2003

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The era of modern cryptographic theory started with [[Claude Shannon]], arguably the father of mathematical cryptography. In [[1949]] he published the paper [http://www3.edgenet.net/dcowley/docs.html Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems] in the Bell System Technical Journal and a little later the book, Mathematical Theory of Communication, with Warren Weaver. These, in addition to his other works on [[information theory|information and communication theory]] established a strong theoretical basis for cryptography.

[[1976]] saw two major public (ie, non-secret!) advances. First was the [[DES]] (Data Encryption Standard) developed by [[IBM]], with 'advice' and modification fyby the [[NSA]], at the invitation of the National Bureau of Standards (now NIST), in an effort to develop secure electronic communication facilities for businesses such as banks. DES was later published as a [[FIPS]] (Federal Information Processing Standard) in [[1977]] (currently at FIPS 46-3), and has been made effectively obsolete by the adoption of the Advanced Encryption Standard, also a NIST project, as FIPS 197. DES was the first cipher algorithm accessible to the public 'blessed' by a national crypto agency such as NSA. The release of the specifications of the DES algorithm by NBS (now NIST) stimulated an explosion of public and academic interest in cryptography. DES and more secure variants of it (such as [[3DES]], see FIPS 46-3) are still used today, although DES was officially supplanted by [[AES]] (Advanced Encryption Standard) in [[2001]] when NIST announced the selection of Rinjdael, by two Belgian cryptographers. It remains in wide use nonetheless, having been incorporated into many national and organizational standards.

Secondly, and even more importantly, was the publication of the paper [http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/340126.html New Directions in Cryptography] by [[Whitfield Diffie]] and [[Martin Hellman]]. This paper introduced a radically new method of distributing cryptographic keys, known as asymmetric key cryptography. This essentially solved one of the fundamental problems of cryptography, key distribution.

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=== Public key / private key encryption algorithms (aka [[asymmetric key algorithm]]s) ===

* [[RSA]]

* El Gamal

* [[Diffie-Hellman]]

* [[El Gamal]]

* [[Elliptic curve cryptography]]

* [[PGP]]

* [[RSA]]

=== Secret key algorithms (aka [[symmetric key algorithm]]s) ===