2010

Network Engineering 304

Assignment2
(PART 2)

Cryptography

P.M.R.S. PATHIRAJA
Curtin ID: 15003670
SLIIT ID: DCN / 07 / C3 / 0569
Date: 03 - 10 - 2010
Contents

Introduction...............................................................................................................................3

How Cryptography is done .......................................................................................................4

Cryptography Algorithms ........................................................................................................7

Goals of Cryptography .............................................................................................................8

Advantages and Disadvantages of Cryptography ....................................................................9

FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS ................................................................................................ 10

References................................................................................................................................ 11
Introduction

Cryptography or cryptology is a Greek word that means 'hidden'. Today, cryptography

has become a branch of information theory and is used within a mathematical approach to study
the transmission of information from place to place. Roots of the cryptography began around
2000 B.C in Egypt when hieroglyphics were used to decode to tell the story of the life of the
deceased.
Encryption methods used mainly, practical application of hiding information from others.
Cryptographic method required the alphabet to be flipped so that each letter in the original
alphabet is mapped to a different letter in the flipped alphabet. This was call “atbash”. For an
example atbash encryption scheme is shown below:

ABCDEFGHI JK LMNOPQ R STU VW XYZ

ZYXWVUTSR QP ONMLKJ I HGF ED CBA

For example if we write the word “SLIIT” it will encrypted into “HPRRG”. This is a
substitution chipher because one chipher is replaced by another character. This simplistic
encryption method worked for its time and for particular cultures, but eventually more complex
mechanisms were required.
Cryptography has a rich history. William Frederick Friedman published The Index of
Coincidence and Its Applications in Cryptography and He is referred to as the “Father of Modern
Cryptography” and broke many messages that were intercepted during World War II. Encryption
has been used by many governments and militaries and has allowed great victory for some
because of the covert maneuvers that could be accomplished in shrouded secrecy. It has also
brought great defeat to others when their cryptosystems were discovered and deciphered.
Mean while the computer has came to the scene. Through that machine possibilities for
encryption methods and devices advanced, and cryptography efforts expanded exponentially.
New dawn was occurred for the cryptography designers and encryption techniques. Lucifer was
a well known project developed at the IBM. This project introduces complex mathematical
equations and functions that were later adopted and modified by the U.S. National Security
Agency to come up with the U.S Data Encryption Standard.
A majority of the protocols developed at the dawn of the computing age have had
upgraded to include cryptography to add necessary layers of protection. Encryption is used in
hardware devices and software to protect data, banking transactions, corporate extranets, e-mail,
Web transactions, wireless communication, storing of confidential information, faxes, and phone
calls.
As our dependency upon technology increases, so does our dependency upon
Cryptography, because secrets will always need to be kept.
How Cryptography is done

Cryptography is a way of storing and transmitting data by protecting information by

encoding it into unreadable format. It is an effective way of protecting sensitive information as it
is stored on media or transmitting through network communication links. Or in other words
cryptography presents various methods for taking legible, readable data, and transforming it into
unreadable data for the purpose of secure transmission, and then using a key to transform it back
into readable data when it reaches its destination.

Cryptosystem means systems which provide encryption and decryption. This can be
created through hardware components or program code in an application. Cryptography
algorithm determines the complexity of the cryptograph. Most of the algorithms are complex
mathematical formulas that are applied in a specific sequence to the plaintext. Encryption
method use value called key, which works with the algorithm to encrypt and decrypt the text.
 Generally all cryptography contains four basic parts.

 Plaintext - Unscrambled information to be transmitted. It could be a simple text

document, a credit card number, a password, a bank account number, or sensitive
information such as payroll data, personnel information, or a secret formula being
transmitted between organizations.

 Cipher text - Represents plain text rendered unintelligible by the application of a

mathematical algorithm. Cipher text is the encrypted plain text that is transmitted to
the receiver.

 Cryptographic Algorithm - A mathematical formula used to scramble the plain text

to yield cipher text. Converting plain text to cipher text using the cryptographic
algorithm is called encryption, and converting cipher text back to plain text using the
same cryptographic algorithm is called decryption.

 Key - A mathematical value, formula, or process that determines how a plaintext

message is encrypted or decrypted. The key is the only way to decipher the scrambled
information.

Symmetric, which cryptosystems use the same secret key to encrypt or decrypt a message
received data packet from trusted partners.
 The other cryptosystem is asymmetric system under, which two different keys is used to
encrypt and decrypt the message or received data packet. On public key is used to encrypt the
data or message and the private key on receiving end is used to decrypt the message or data
packet.
Cryptography Algorithms

Considering the about cryptography method there are some algorithms use for do
cryptography methods, mainly these algorithms can be divided in to tow categories

Stream algorithms- Operate on plaintext one byte at a time, where a byte is a

character, number, or special character. The process is inefficient and slow.

Block algorithms - Operate on plaintext in groups of bytes, called blocks. Sizes

for modern algorithms are 64 bytes. Unfortunately, with the current speed of
microprocessors, breaking a 64-byte algorithm using brute force is proving to be
to relatively easy task.

So if we take examples for cryptography algorithms there are

 shared-secret algorithms, called block ciphers
 Stream Ciphers
 Hash Algorithms

There are many block ciphers such as RC2, DES, 3DES, Rijndael, REDOC, RC6,
Safer,MISTY, MARS, NewDES. For Stream Ciphers we can have ORYX, RC4, and SEAL as
examples. MD2, MD5, RIPEMD, SHA1, Snefru, Tiger are example for Hashing Alogorithems.

Below are some of the cryptography primitives and their uses.

Cryptographic Use
primitive
Shared-secret encryption Performs a transformation on data, keeping the data from being
(symmetric cryptography) read by third parties. This type of encryption uses a single, shared-
secret key to encrypt and decrypt data.
Public-key encryption Performs a transformation on data, keeping the data from being
(asymmetric cryptography) read by third parties. This type of encryption uses a public/private
key pair to encrypt and decrypt data.
Cryptographic signing Ensures that data originates from a specific party by creating a
digital signature that is unique to that party. This process also uses
hash functions.
Cryptographic hashes Maps data from any length to a fixed-length byte sequence. Hashes
are statistically unique; a different two-byte sequence will not hash
to the same value. Hashes are one-way algorithms.
Goals of Cryptography

Through the cryptography we can provide confidentiality, authenticity and integrity

services. Confidentiality means unauthorized parties cannot access the information.
Authenticity to validating the source of the message to ensure the sender is correctly identified.
Providing assurance that the message was not modified during transmission call integrity.
Example is shown below.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Cryptography

Considering about the cryptography there advantages and disadvantages of it.

Advantages:
1. The biggest advantage of public key cryptography is the secure nature of the
private key. In fact, it never needs to be transmitted or revealed to anyone.

2. It enables the use of digital certificates and digital timestamps, which is a very
secure technique of signature authorization. We will look at digital timestamps
and digital signatures in a moment.

Disadvantages:
1. Transmission time for documents encrypted using public key cryptography is
significantly slower then symmetric cryptography. In fact, transmission of very
large documents is prohibitive.

2. The key sizes must be significantly larger than symmetric cryptography to

achieve the same level of protection.

3. Public key cryptography is susceptible to impersonation attacks

FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS
There are two areas that mainly focused in the field of cryptography:

 Quantum cryptography.
 DNA cryptography.

Quantum cryptography

Quantum cryptography attempts to achieve the same security of information as other

forms of cryptography but through the use of photons, or packets of light. In October 1989 at
IBM’s Thomas J. Watson research center Dr.Charles Bennet and research student named John
Smolin witnessed the first ever quantum cryptographic exchange. Using polarized light photons,
computers called “Alice” and “Bob” successfully negotiated a completely secure channel of
communication.

Message encrypted using quantum cryptography is secured by the laws of quantum

physics, so if it was provably insecure the most successful theory in the history of physics would
be disproved and our current understanding of the universe shattered. However, there are issues
of data security relevant to a cipher beyond its confidentiality.

DNA cryptography

Using biological methods for the cryptography is call DNA cryptography. Considering
the DNA cryptography there are two different approaches. First approach shows how DNA
binary strands can be used for steganography, a technique of encryption by information hiding,
to provide rapid encryption and decryption.

Second one is based on steganography and a method of graphical subtraction of binary

gel-images. It can be used to constitute a molecular checksum and can be combined with the first
approach to support encryption.
References
 www-math.cudenver.edu/~wcherowi/courses/m5410/m5410cc.html
 www.math.nmsu.edu/~crypto/Caesar.html
 www.ssuet.edu.pk/taimoor/athar/ce-408/encryption/
 http://home.ecn.ab.ca/~jsavard/crypto/pp0102.htm
 Feghhi, Jalal, Feghhi, Jalil, Williams, Peter, Digital Certificates, Addison Wesley
Longman, Inc., 1999
 SSH Communications Security, http://www.ssh.fi/tech/crypto/intro.html#algorithms
 Quantum Mechanics History – J. J. O’Conner & E. F. Robertson
http://www-groups.dcs.stand.
 ac.uk/~history/HistTopics/The_Quantum_age_begins.html
 Quantum Theory and Wave/Particle Duality – John K. N. Murphy
http://www.hotquanta.com/wpd.html
 Introducing Quantum Theory – J. P. McEvoy & Oscar Zarate
Icon Books, 1999, ISBN 1-84046-057-1
 The Centre for Quantum Computation
http://www.qubit.org
 David Deutsch’s Homepage
http://www.qubit.org/people/david/David.html