Cryptography and Cybersecurity Paramount Challenges

By Paulo Pereira, PhD, DFIR

Few persons can be made to believe that it is not quite an easy thing to invent a method of secret writing which shall baffle investigation. Yet it may be roundly asserted that human ingenuity cannot concoct a cipher which human ingenuity cannot resolve. (Edgar Allan Poe, Cryptography, Eureka and Miscellanies, p. 262, 1895).

I. Introduction

Modern cryptography played a key role during World War II, especially with the encoding of German messages by the Enigma machine. However, since 1932, the important work of Polish cryptologist Marian Rejewski, who used statistical analysis to break Enigma's encryption, contributed to the cracking of this cryptographic system by Alan Turing and his team. These days, encryption helps protect data in a variety of business and government endeavors. But assuming an attacker could have a quantum computer with enough computing power to factor a prime number of more than 300 digits in their hands, for example, encryption security as it currently exists would be threatened.

II. Classical Cryptography and the perfect security

There are people that still create their passwords with a pattern that is easily identified by an adversary, an attacker who will manage to break into an account, a cell phone, a server. When a weather forecast service always says that tomorrow it will rain, we do not need to wait for the next forecast as it will be the same as the previous ones. There is no variability in this information because the result is always....