Article | REF: H5210 V1

Applied cryptography

Author: Pierre-Alain FOUQUE

Publication date: November 10, 2003

You do not have access to this resource.
Click here to request your free trial access!

Already subscribed? Log in!


Overview

Français

Read this article from a comprehensive knowledge base, updated and supplemented with articles reviewed by scientific committees.

Read the article

AUTHOR

  • Pierre-Alain FOUQUE: Telecoms engineer, doctorate in cryptography - Researcher at the Cryptography Laboratory of the French Central Information Systems Security Directorate (DCSSI)

 INTRODUCTION

Today, cryptographers have defined security objectives and notions that meet the security needs of users, such as confidentiality, integrity and authentication. Cryptography has become a scientific discipline in its own right, using mathematical and computational concepts to prove the security of schemes. However, new attacks periodically undermine user confidence. Recently, two attacks on the secure communications standard used on the Internet, Secure Socket Layer (SSL), were widely publicized in the press and on the Internet. These attacks do not call into question the systems' security credentials, but they do show that the adversaries' modeling is not ideal. Indeed, to treat a problem theoretically, scientists need to model reality. In cryptography, it is necessary to represent the adversary's goals and means, i.e. what it seeks to do and how it interacts with the system. This is where cryptography shows its limitations in the face of reality: it is difficult to study all possible adversaries exhaustively.

After recalling the design principles of cryptographic schemes for encryption and electronic signature, we will describe some of the limitations of current systems, demonstrating the difficulty of designing secure systems. This difficulty is today linked to the implementation of cryptographic schemes in computer systems such as smart cards, accelerator cards, etc. Finally, we'll give some examples of secure communications standards.

Attack: operation that attempts to...

You do not have access to this resource.

Exclusive to subscribers. 97% yet to be discovered!

You do not have access to this resource.
Click here to request your free trial access!

Already subscribed? Log in!


The Ultimate Scientific and Technical Reference

A Comprehensive Knowledge Base, with over 1,200 authors and 100 scientific advisors
+ More than 10,000 articles and 1,000 how-to sheets, over 800 new or updated articles every year
From design to prototyping, right through to industrialization, the reference for securing the development of your industrial projects

This article is included in

Security of information systems

This offer includes:

Knowledge Base

Updated and enriched with articles validated by our scientific committees

Services

A set of exclusive tools to complement the resources

Practical Path

Operational and didactic, to guarantee the acquisition of transversal skills

Doc & Quiz

Interactive articles with quizzes, for constructive reading

Subscribe now!

Ongoing reading
Applied cryptography