Estimators in Cryptography

TL;DR

This paper discusses the mathematical foundations for evaluating cryptographic systems, focusing on entropy measures for key generators and key agreement protocols to assess their security.

Contribution

It provides the necessary mathematical background to estimate key cryptographic measures like Shannon and Renyi entropy for security assessment.

Findings

Establishes criteria for comparing cipher systems.

Details the use of Shannon and Renyi entropy in cryptography.

Provides mathematical tools for security evaluation.

Abstract

One of the main problems in cryptography is to give criteria to provide good comparators of cipher systems. The security of a cipher system must include the security of the algorithm, the security of the key generator and management module (see [BM94], [CM97],[Mau92a]) and the security of the cryptographic key agreement protocol (see [Mau93a],[MC94],[Mau93b],[Mau92b]). This paper gives show the necessary mathematical background to estimate the most important cryptographic measures of the key generators and of the unconditionally key agreement protocols. These cryptographic measures are the Shannon entropy (for the key generator module) and Renyi entropy of order alpha for the key agreement protocol.