Posts in Cybersecurity

Authenticated encryption

With growing dependency on information technology and more at stake, the security aspect has become more vital than ever. Within this context acts authenticated encryption(AE) as a shared-key based transform whose goal is to provide secrecy, Integrity and authenticity of the encapsulated data 1. AE combines traditional Symmetric Encryption (SE) with a Message Authentication Code (MAC) in different orders 2. This article introduces the different combinations of authenticated encryption and their applications.

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Encryption overview

Encryption transforms a plain-text into a cipher-text using an encryption key. The process of reversing this operation uses also a key and is called "decryption" 1. These operations can be explained by the following formulas: \(C=E_{k}(P)\) and \(P=D_{k}(C)\), where P = plain-text, C = cipher-text, E = the encryption method, D = the decryption method, and k = the key 1. There exist several types of encryption (symmetric/asymmetric) and several ciphering techniques (block/stream) and modes etc 1.

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Cryptography overview

Cryptography is mostly associated with the development and creation of mathematical algorithms, which are used to insure various security aspects See 12. It is the cornerstone of modern communications security and is based on various mathematical concepts and theories such as: number theory, computational complexity theory and probability theory 3. The following post provides a quick overview of various cryptography concepts such as encryption, decryption and hashing.

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