Saturday, November 30, 2013

Cryptography & Theory 1: Meaning of Secure

Cryptography & Theory is series of blog posts on things I learned in coursera stanford online crypto class. The class contained just right mixture of theory, math and programming and I enjoyed it a lot.

This first part explains what is meant by expression "good cipher". It contains definition of a cipher and multiple definitions of cipher security. Although it does not sounds like much, it is one of the most important things I learned there.

It is important because ciphers are designed to protect against well defined attacks and are vulnerable to anything else. One can not just take random cipher from build-in ciphers list of his favorite framework and call it a day. One has to understand what is he choosing and why.