Encryption Project Description

A Survery on the Use of Encryption and Encryption Schemes Team Members Josh Opos Andrew Terry Steven Huang John Naegle Project Description Information secuirty has played a critical role in protecting national secrets, strategies and communications for many thousands of years. Whenever a communication medium, such as paper-based message passing, radio transmissions, or digital information can be observed by an advesary, such as a foreign government, and the value of the information is high, information security has been critical to safeguarding the information. Cryptography, the process of scrambling ordinary text into a cipher text with encryption techniques and decrypting the transmitted message, is one means of achieving information security and has been in use for thousands of years. Julius Caesar used a simple substitution cipher to transpose the letters of the alphabet by three positions in 50 BC. more examples. The digital age has lowered, or eliminated, the cost for duplicating, transmitting or altering information and the encryption techniques used to ensure privacy, data integrity, authentication and other tenents of information security have evolved as well. In most applications of cryptography, the transmitted cipher text is readily available. In the early 20th century, encrypted messages were sent via radio making it possible for any listener to intercept the text. Similarly, any knowledgable listener can intercept internet traffic and capture the cipher text. In almost every instance, cryptography is required because of unsecured communications channels that can be passivly or actively attacked by an enemy. In addition there is little security through algorithmic obscurity. History has shown that maintaining the secrecy of an encryption algorithm to be very difficult. The modern cryptographic and security communities now assume that an adversary is given cipher texts and the encryption schemes that produce the cipher text. The cryptographic community is highly skilled and trained to understand these fundamental axioms. However, the people applying encryption schemes may not have a through understanding of the principels involved . Even when there have been highly skilled personnel coming up with encryption schemes, the use of these schemes has been carried out by individuals in such ways that the underlying keys used to perform the encryption or decryption were exposed to the enemy. An encryption scheme that is secure against all possible attacks can easily be redered insecure if it is applied incorrectly. Governmental policy places many restrictions on encryptions standards and implementations, such that many companies and consumers are unable to use the strongest encryption methods. This causes many different encryption schemes to be used, and while each may be individually secure, users are prevented from learning and applying a common encryption model. This project will discuss the history of encryption and will point out key events which led to the formulation of the current state of encryption and information security in the digitial age. It will show the progression of adversarial attacks and what lengths adversaries will go in order to decipher messages. It will discuss current encryption policy and pracitices and how they have played a role in information secuirty, where they have succeeded and where they hae failed. In addition, it will look to the future of encryption and information security and make recommendations for future policy makers.

http://cse.unl.edu/~bholley/Cypher%20Tutorial.html