Chapter Summary
This chapter provides an overview of the problems that cryptology deals with. The first and oldest cryptographic primitive is encryption for secure transmission of messages. Some other primitives are key exchange, digital signature, authentication, secret sharing, hashing, and digital certificates. We then highlight the difference between symmetric (secret-key) and asymmetric (public-key) cryptography. The relevance of some computationally intractable mathematical problems in public-key cryptography is discussed next, and the working of a prototype public-key cryptosystem (RSA) is explained. We finally discuss different models of attacks on cryptosystems.
Not uncommonly, some people think that cryptology also deals with intrusion, ...
Get Public-key Cryptography: Theory and Practice now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
