Cryptography Concepts & Techniques-Introduction

Unit 2

[Cryptography: Concepts & Techniques-Introduction, Plaintext & Cipher text, Substitution Techniques, Transposition
Techniques, Encryption & Decryption, and Symmetric & Asymmetric key Cryptography, Key Range & Key Size [7]]

2.1 Plain text & Cipher Text

2.2 Substitution techniques

2.3 Transposition techniques

2.4 Encryption & Decryption

2.5 Symmetric & Asymmetric key cryptography

Cryptography: Concepts & Techniques-Introduction

2.1 PLAIN TEXT & CIPHER TEXT

Cryptography is the art and science of achieving security by encoding messages to make them non-readable.

Cryptanalysis is the technique of decoding messages from a non-readable format back to readable format without
knowing how they were initially converted from readable format to non-readable format.

Cryptology is a combination of cryptography and cryptanalysis.

Plain Text : Clear text or plain text signifies a message that can be understood by the sender, the recipient and also
by anyone else who gets an access to that message.

Cipher Text : When a plain text message is codified using any suitable scheme,the resulting message is called as
cipher text.

Origin of Cryptography

Human being from ages had two inherent needs − (a) to communicate and share information and (b) to
communicate selectively. These two needs gave rise to the art of coding the messages in such a way that only the
intended people could have access to the information. Unauthorized people could not extract any information, even
if the scrambled messages fell in their hand.

The art and science of concealing the messages to introduce secrecy in information security is recognized as
cryptography.

The word ‘cryptography’ was coined by combining two Greek words, ‘Krypto’ meaning hidden and ‘graphene’
meaning writing.

n present day scenario security of the system is the sole priority of any organisation. The main aim of any
organisation is to protect their data from attackers. In cryptography, attacks are of two types such as Passive attacks
and Active attacks.
Passive attacks are those that retrieve information from the system without affecting the system resources while
active attacks are those that retrieve system information and make changes to the system resources and their
operations.

Figure : 1.1

In figure 1.1 it made the text secure by forming it into cipher text using encryption algorithm and
further decryption to use it.

Computer data often travels from one computer to another, leaving the safety of its protected physical
surroundings. Once the data is out of hand, people with bad intention could modify or forge your data, either for
amusement or for their own benefit.

Cryptography can reformat and transform our data, making it safer on its trip between computers. The technology is
based on the essentials of secret codes, augmented by modern mathematics that protects our data in powerful
ways.

• Computer Security - generic name for the collection of tools designed to protect data and to thwart hackers

• Network Security - measures to protect data during their transmission

• Internet Security - measures to protect data during their transmission over a collection of interconnected
networks
Basic Concepts

Terminologies of Cryptography
Cryptography-A mathematical science of controlling access to information.

Cryptography deals with methods for protecting the privacy and integrity while preserving functionality of computer
and communicator systems.

Cryptography The art or science encompassing the principles and methods of transforming an intelligible message
into one that is unintelligible, and then retransforming that message back to its original form.

Plaintext The original intelligible message.. This is the original intelligible message or data that is fed into the
algorithm as input.

Cipher text The transformed message,,,This is the scrambled message produced as output. It depends on the
plaintext and the secret key. For a given message, two different keys will produce two different cipher texts.
The cipher text is an apparently random stream of data and, as it stands, is unintelligible.

Cipher An algorithm for transforming an intelligible message into one that is unintelligible by transposition and/or
substitution methods

Key Some critical information used by the cipher, known only to the sender & receiver

Secret key

The secret key is also input to the encryption algorithm. The key is a value independent of the plaintext and of the
algorithm. The algorithm will produce a different output depending on the specific key being used at the time. The
exact substitutions and transformations performed by the algorithm depend on the key.

Encipher (encode) The process of converting plaintext to cipher text using a cipher and a key

Decipher (decode) the process of converting cipher text back into plaintext using a cipher and a key

Enciphering Algorithm

The encryption algorithm performs various substitutions and transformations on the plaintext

Deciphering Algorithm

This is essentially the encryption algorithm run in reverse. It takes the cipher text and the secret key and produces
the original plaintext.

Cryptanalysis The study of principles and methods of transforming an unintelligible message back into an intelligible
message without knowledge of the key. Also called code breaking

Cryptology Both cryptography and cryptanalysis

Code An algorithm for transforming an intelligible message into an unintelligible one using a code-book

Cryptography
Cryptographic systems are generally classified along 3 independent dimensions:

Type of operations used for transforming plain text to cipher text

All the encryption algorithms are based on two general principles: substitution, in which each element in the
plaintext is mapped into another element, and transposition, in which elements in the plaintext are rearranged.

The number of keys used

If the sender and receiver uses same key then it is said to be symmetric key (or) single key (or) conventional
encryption.

If the sender and receiver use different keys then it is said to be public key encryption.

The way in which the plain text is processed

A block cipher processes the input and block of elements at a time, producing output block for each input block.

A stream cipher processes the input elements continuously, producing output element one at a time, as it goes
along.

Cryptanalysis

The process of attempting to discover X or K or both is known as cryptanalysis. The strategy used by the cryptanalysis
depends on the nature of the encryption scheme and the information available to the cryptanalyst.

There are various types of cryptanalytic attacks based on the amount ofinformation known to the cryptanalyst.

Cipher text only – A copy of cipher text alone is known to the cryptanalyst.

Known plaintext – The cryptanalyst has a copy of the cipher text and the correspondingplaintext.

Chosen plaintext – The cryptanalysts gains temporary access to the encryption machine. Theycannot open it to find
the key, however; they can encrypt a large number of suitably chosen plaintexts and try to use the resulting cipher
texts to deduce the key.

Chosen cipher text – The cryptanalyst obtains temporary access to the decryption machine, uses it to decrypt
several string of symbols, and tries to use the results to deduce the key.

STEGANOGRAPHY
A plaintext message may be hidden in any one of the two ways. The methods of steganography conceal the
existence of the message, whereas the methods of cryptography render the message unintelligible to outsiders by
various transformations of the text.

A simple form of steganography, but one that is time consuming to construct is one in which an arrangement of
words or letters within an apparently innocuous text spells out the real message.

e.g., (i) the sequence of first letters of each word of the overall message spells out the real (Hidden) message.

(ii) Subset of the words of the overall message is used to convey the hidden message.

Various other techniques have been used historically, some of them are Character marking – selected letters of
printed or typewritten text are overwritten in pencil. The marks are ordinarily not visible unless the paper is held to
an angle to bright light.

Invisible ink – a number of substances can be used for writing but leave no visible trace until heat or some chemical
is applied to the paper.
Pin punctures – small pin punctures on selected letters are ordinarily not visible unless the paper is held in front of
the light. Typewritten correction ribbon – used between the lines typed with a black ribbon, the results of typing
with the correction tape are visible only under a strong light.

Drawbacks of steganography
Requires a lot of overhead to hide a relatively few bits of information.

Once the system is discovered, it becomes virtually worthless.

Cryptography is the art and science of making a cryptosystem that is capable of providing information security.
Cryptography deals with the actual securing of digital data. It refers to the design of mechanisms based on
mathematical algorithms that provide fundamental information security services.

CRYPTOSYSTEM
A cryptosystem is an implementation of cryptographic techniques and their accompanying infrastructure to provide
information security services. A cryptosystem is also referred to as a cipher system.

Figure.1. Cryptosystem

Cryptosystem shown in fig.1, is th study of secure communications techniques that allow only the sender and
intended recipient of a message to view its contents. When transmitting electronic data, the most common use of
cryptography is to encrypt and decrypt email and other plain-text messages. It reformats and transform our data,
making it safer on its trip between computers. The technology is based on the essentials of secret codes,
augmented by modern mathematics that protects our data in powerful ways.

Modern cryptography
Modern cryptography is the cornerstone of computer and communications security. Its foundation is based
on various concepts of mathematics such as number theory, computational-complexity theory, and
probability theory.

Characteristics of Modern Cryptography

There are three major characteristics that separate modern cryptography from the classical approach.

Classic Cryptography Modern Cryptography

It manipulates traditional characters, i.e., It operates on binary bit sequences.
letters and digits directly.

It is mainly based on ‘security through It relies on publicly known mathematical

obscurity’. The techniques employed for algorithms for coding the information.
coding were kept secret and only the Secrecy is obtained through a secrete key
parties involved in communication knew which is used as the seed for the
about them. algorithms. The computational difficulty
of algorithms, absence of secret key, etc.,
make it impossible for an attacker to
obtain the original information even if he
knows the algorithm used for coding.

It requires the entire cryptosystem for Modern cryptography requires parties

communicating confidentially. interested in secure communication to
possess the secret key only.

Context of Cryptography
Cryptology, the study of cryptosystems, can be subdivided into two branches −

 Cryptography
 Cryptanalysis

What is Cryptography?
Cryptography is the art and science of making a cryptosystem that is capable of providing information
security.
Cryptography deals with the actual securing of digital data. It refers to the design of mechanisms based on
mathematical algorithms that provide fundamental information security services. You can think of
cryptography as the establishment of a large toolkit containing different techniques in security applications.
What is Cryptanalysis?
The art and science of breaking the cipher text is known as cryptanalysis.
Cryptanalysis is the sister branch of cryptography and they both co-exist. The cryptographic process results
in the cipher text for transmission or storage. It involves the study of cryptographic mechanism with the
intention to break them. Cryptanalysis is also used during the design of the new cryptographic techniques to
test their security strengths.
Note − Cryptography concerns with the design of cryptosystems, while cryptanalysis studies the breaking of
cryptosystems.