Abstract
In this chapter we follow the history of ciphers from its beginning to modern days. The historic few point helps us to understand the difference between the two big classes of ciphers (block ciphers and stream ciphers). We analyse attacks from the past to learn for the future.
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- 1.
This is an important point that is often missed. Cryptography and proofs have a very special relation.
What does it mean to say that a one-time pad is provably unconditionally secure? It is of course pointless to try to guess a pattern in a truly random sequence. This is exactly what the proof says. However, there are some rare examples where people try to use a one time-pad, but use a (weakly) biased random sequence. In this case there is a real chance to do some analysis and there are examples of successful attacks against such pseudo one-time pads.
The one-time pad is a pure cipher, it does not secure the message against active attacks. So if you want to use a one-time pad, you should consider using it in addition to a perfect MAC to guarantee the authentication of the message.
Finally, even the best cipher does not help if you use a malfunction protocol. There are a lot of examples where a system has been broken by ignoring the cipher completely and just using a protocol failure. Section 9.2.3 contains an interesting example of this kind.
In a nutshell, security proofs are not worthless, but you must carefully check what the proof exactly says. It is often not what you really want (see also the discussion in Chap. 11).
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Klein, A. (2013). Introduction to Stream Ciphers. In: Stream Ciphers. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-5079-4_1
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