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  • Data Encryption Standard

    The Data Encryption Standard (DES) is a symmetric-key block cipher published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). DES is an implementation of a Feistel Cipher. It uses 16 round Feistel structure. The block size is 64-bit. Though, key length is 64-bit, DES has an effective key length of 56 bits, since 8…

  • Feistel Block Cipher

    Feistel Cipher is not a specific scheme of block cipher. It is a design model from which many different block ciphers are derived. DES is just one example of a Feistel Cipher. A cryptographic system based on Feistel cipher structure uses the same algorithm for both encryption and decryption. Encryption Process The encryption process uses…

  • Block Cipher

    The basic scheme of a block cipher is depicted as follows − A block cipher takes a block of plaintext bits and generates a block of ciphertext bits, generally of same size. The size of block is fixed in the given scheme. The choice of block size does not directly affect to the strength of…

  • Modern Symmetric Key Encryption

    Digital data is represented in strings of binary digits (bits) unlike alphabets. Modern cryptosystems need to process this binary strings to convert in to another binary string. Based on how these binary strings are processed, a symmetric encryption schemes can be classified in to − Block Ciphers In this scheme, the plain binary text is…

  • Security Value

    Vigenere Cipher was designed by tweaking the standard Caesar cipher to reduce the effectiveness of cryptanalysis on the ciphertext and make a cryptosystem more robust. It is significantly more secure than a regular Caesar Cipher. In the history, it was regularly used for protecting sensitive political and military information. It was referred to as the unbreakable cipher due…

  • Security Value

    It is also a substitution cipher and is difficult to break compared to the simple substitution cipher. As in case of substitution cipher, cryptanalysis is possible on the Playfair cipher as well, however it would be against 625 possible pairs of letters (25×25 alphabets) instead of 26 different possible alphabets. The Playfair cipher was used…

  • Playfair Cipher

    In this scheme, pairs of letters are encrypted, instead of single letters as in the case of simple substitution cipher. In playfair cipher, initially a key table is created. The key table is a 5×5 grid of alphabets that acts as the key for encrypting the plaintext. Each of the 25 alphabets must be unique…

  • Simple Substitution Cipher

    It is an improvement to the Caesar Cipher. Instead of shifting the alphabets by some number, this scheme uses some permutation of the letters in alphabet. For example, A.B…..Y.Z and Z.Y……B.A are two obvious permutation of all the letters in alphabet. Permutation is nothing but a jumbled up set of alphabets. With 26 letters in…

  • Traditional Ciphers

    In the second chapter, we discussed the fundamentals of modern cryptography. We equated cryptography with a toolkit where various cryptographic techniques are considered as the basic tools. One of these tools is the Symmetric Key Encryption where the key used for encryption and decryption is the same. In this chapter, we discuss this technique further…

  • Cryptographic Attacks

    The basic intention of an attacker is to break a cryptosystem and to find the plaintext from the ciphertext. To obtain the plaintext, the attacker only needs to find out the secret decryption key, as the algorithm is already in public domain. Hence, he applies maximum effort towards finding out the secret key used in…

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