L9: Crypto, One time pad

Materials

Use the raw slides (pdf) before lecture to take notes.

Summary

  • Review of perfect security: the ciphertext carries no information about the message
  • Indistinguishable security: simpler definition. “For any pair of messages, c is equally likely to be the ciphertext for either message.” This notion turns out to be equivalent to perfect security.
  • One-time pad (Vernam) satisfies perfect security.
    • List of weaknesses of the one-time pad.
    • Keys must be inherently long.
  • If you want to use smaller keys for convenience, you have to weaken the security notion.
  • Computational security
    • how can we compare functions? e.g. polynomial vs exponential
    • Asymptotic approach
  • Indistinguishable encryption
    • Security game INDCPA