Abstract
The field of cryptography is concerned with techniques by which information may be concealed in cipher texts and made unintelligible to all but the intended recipient. This ensures the privacy of the information sent, as any information intercepted will be meaningless to anyone other than the recipient. It employs theoretical results from number theory to convert the original message (or plaintext) into cipher text that is then transmitted over a secure channel to the intended recipient. The cipher text is meaningless to anyone other than the intended recipient, and the recipient uses a key to decrypt the received cipher text and to read the original message.
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Notes
- 1.
Turing made fundamental contributions to computing, including the theoretical Turing machine.
- 2.
Here x and c are variables rather than the alphabetic characters ‘x’ and ‘c’.
- 3.
This requirement is to ensure that the matrix A is invertible.
- 4.
The NBS is now known as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
References
An Improved Algorithm for Computing Algorithms over GF(p) and its Cryptographic Significance. S. Pohlig and M. Hellman (1978). IEEE Transactions on Information Theory (24): 106–110.
Data Encryption Standard. FIPS-Pub 46. National Bureau of Standards. U.S. Department of Commerce. January 1977.
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© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
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O’Regan, G. (2016). Cryptography. In: Guide to Discrete Mathematics. Texts in Computer Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44561-8_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44561-8_10
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