Communication Theory of

Secrecy Systems
On a paper by Shannon
(and the industry it didnt
spawn)

Gilad Tsur
Yossi Oren
December 2005

What youll see today

Shannon his life and work
Cryptography before Shannon
Definition of a cryptosystem
Theoretical and practical security
Product ciphers and combined
cryptosystems
Closing thoughts

Shannon his life and work

Claude E. Shannon (1916-2001)

Claude E. Shannon (1916-2001)

Important facts:
M. Sc. Thesis founded an industry
Ph. D. finished in 1.5 years
Married a computer in 1949
Wrote scientific papers on a variety of topics,
including juggling

Shannons Information Theory Paper

Mathematical Theory of Communication,
published in 1948
Main claim:

All sources of data have a rate

All channels have a capacity
If the capacity is greater than the rate,
transmission with no errors is possible

Introduced concept of entropy of a random

variable/process

From http://www.cqrsoft.com/history/scytale.htm

Cryptography before Shannon

Themes in cryptography
Seals were used as authentication means
for signing contracts, for royal decrees
and for other documents.
Passwords were used by military and
other organizations to identify members.
From
http://images.encarta.msn.com/xrefme
dia/sharemed/targets/images/pho/t025/
T025102A.jpg

Codes are semantic while ciphers are

syntactic.

All these methods (in the case of seals,

as rubber stamps) are also in use today.

Ancient Ciphers I


Atbash cipher used in old testament =
Of course, anyone whod ever heard of this cipher could
easily crack it.
This is also true for another famous cipher, the Caesar
cipher.

A BC
D E F

X Y Z
A B C

Ancient Ciphers II
The Caesar cipher is just a specific case of what are
generally known as Shift Ciphers.
A Shift cipher is one where the code is simply a
rotation of the alphabet with K steps, where the
number K can be considered the key. Easier for us in
CS think of it as a constant added modulo the size
of the alphabet.
Obviously, finding the key for such a code is not a
lengthy process.

Ancient Ciphers III

So what were these ciphers good for?
Text took an active effort to understand (This was
used with ROT-13 on Usenet).
Probably the real reason security through
obscurity.
The concept of cryptography was not that well
known, and codes such as Atbash were simply
assumed not to be known by people you didnt want
reading them.

Ancient Ciphers IV
Both Atbash and Shift ciphers are specific cases of
a more general type of ciphers used in the ancient
world: Monoalphabetic Substitution Ciphers.
As these ciphers were used by people who wanted
to remember them, keyword and keyphrase ciphers
were often used.
The keyword could be changed daily to make it
harder to decrypt.
Some of these ciphers didnt use a 1-1
correspondence, trusting the redundancy of language
or allowing multiple representations.

Ancient Ciphers V

http://plus.maths.org/issue34/features/ekert/

Not all ancient ciphers used

substitution methods.
The earliest known
cryptographic device (to the
best of our knowledge) is the
Spartan scytale.
Using this device the letters
of the message werent
changed, but their order was.

Ancient Ciphers VI
The scytale was a device assisting in the creation of
a Transposition Cipher.
Perhaps the most notable example of a
transposition cipher is the column transposition.
Other geometrical transposition ciphers abound,
mostly route ciphers.
Transposition ciphers based on a local permutation
are also common, but offer a less apparently
convenient way of writing quickly.

Ancient Ciphers VII

We have written records of frequency analysis
dating to the 9th century.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesar_cipher
http://plus.maths.org/issue34/features/ekert/

Using multiple options to substitute frequent

letters could make frequency analysis much harder.

Cryptography during the dark

ages (till around 14th century)
Cryptography didnt advance in Europe much during the
dark ages.
Some religious and mystical sects used cryptographic
techniques to encode their writings, often substitution
ciphers to an arcane alphabet.
However, the church considered most people using
cryptography as heretics, sorcerers or witches, and was in
the habit of burning them.
Coupled with low levels of literacy, cryptography was
only studied outside of Europe.
While texts (such as the cryptanalytic one mentioned
above) appeared, we are unaware of major advances.

Codes and ciphers in the

renaissance
In Italy, and later all over Europe,
cryptography returns to fashion.
Different city-states and countries
begin to employ professional
cryptanalysts for encoding and
decoding mail.
The most common codes are
Polyalphabetic Substitution
Ciphers.
Many devices are made to aid
encryption and decryption.

Polyalphabetic substitution
ciphers
These ciphers can simply be considered as a list of
shift ciphers or monoalphabetic substitution ciphers to
be used consecutively.
The use of some of these ciphers was aided by a
cipher disk.
Other such ciphers used tables to assist encryption and
decryption.
Notably, some in of these cipher were polygraphic
each encoded symbol represented a combination of
plaintext symbols.

Cryptanalysis of polyalphabetic
substitution ciphers

The major classic techniques used for this process

involve two steps:
1. Discover the length of cycle.
2. Use monoalphabetic cryptanalysis techniques for
each alphabet (+ information gained from
previous alphabets).
Step 1 can be done systematically (Brute force
approach) but this may be a very hard process.
A shortcut that often helps (and is published in the
19th century, though probably known before) is
finding repeating sequences in the text.

Cryptography in the 19th and 20th

Centauries I
WWI sees the full use of
cryptography in the battle field.
Advances in radio and telegraph
allow military units to communicate
better than ever before. This means
easy to use, generic ciphers are
required. Mechanized cipher
machines offer this option.

Cryptography in the 19th and 20th

Centauries II
WWII is famous for being a
scientific war in general, and for
cryptography in particular.
German Enigma cracked by
British, Japanese Purple by the
US.
Enigma, in fact, a polyalphabetic
cipher system with around 20,000
alphabets.

Definitions of a Cryptosystem

Definitions of a Cryptosystem:
Shannons version II

A cryptosystem can be viewed as a distribution of possible

plaintexts (P), a set of possible ciphertexts (C),
a distribution of possible keys (K) and an encoding transformation
(E) With its inverse (D).

Definitions of a Cryptosystem:
modern variations
Many things have changed in our thinking about
cryptography.
Different functions: Not only trying to transmit secret
information.
Different settings for Alice and Bob we now
have public key cryptosystems and extensive use of
randomness.
Different settings for Eve we now have a variety of
attacks such as known plain text, chosen ciphertext,
chosen plain text and side channel attacks.

Shannons 1948 Paper

Published one year after his monumental
information theory paper
Inspired by Von-Neumanns paper on game
theory
transformed cryptography from art to
science

Main Contributions

Notions of theoretical security and practical

security
Observation that the secret is all in the key, not in
the algorithm the enemy knows the system
(also attributed to Auguste Kerckhoffs)
Product ciphers and mixing transformations
inspiration for LUCIFER and later DES
Proof that Vernams cipher (one-time pad) was
theoretically secure

Theoretical Security and

Practical Security

Theoretical Security and Practical

Security

Theoretically secure cryptosystems cannot be

broken even by an all-powerful adversary
Practically secure cryptosystems require a large
amount of work to solve
Bad news:

The only theoretically secure cryptosystem is the onetime pad

The only practically secure cryptosystem is the
one-time pad
We do have some cryptosystems which are provably
[as] secure as a difficult problem

Review: Bayes Theorem

Let X and Y be two random variables.

Define:

Theorem (Chain Rule):

Apriori

Theorem (Bayes):

Aposteriori

Theoretical (Perfect) Security

What does it mean for a cryptosystem to be
perfectly secure?
Essentially, the adversary doesnt learn
anything from the ciphertext:

Perfect Security means |K||P|

Reminder: adversary knows the system
and has unlimited power
If key-space is finite, each ciphertext must
map to a finite number of plaintexts
If |P|>|K|, some plaintexts will be

impossible for some ciphertexts

The Vernam Cipher (1)

Is there a perfectly secure cryptosystem

for which |K|=|P|?

Theorem (Shannon): Let (P,K,C,E,D) be a

cryptosystem for which |K|=|P|=|C|. Then the
cryptosystem provides perfect secrecy iff:

The Vernam Cipher (2)

Proof: Let (P,K,C,E,D) be a cryptosystem

for which |K|=|P|=|C|.

Because of perfect secrecy:

|K|=|P|=|C|, so there is a unique key associated

with every pair (p,c)

The Vernam Cipher (3)

Fix c. For all possible plaintexts pi, let ki be the

key satisfying eki(pi)=c
By Bayes:

The Vernam Cipher (4)

Cipher was invented by Gilbert Vernam of
Bell Labs in 1919
Idea key is a long random sequence,
C=PK
By above proof, cipher is unbreakable
Disadvantage key is huge and cannot be
used twice
Advantage algorithm is so simple we can
give it to the Soviets

Towards real-world cryptography

How secure are cryptosystems with a smaller key

space?
Rules of the game:

Symmetric (deterministic) encryption

|P|=|C|, all keys chosen equiprobably
Ciphertext-only attack
Adversary wishes to recover the key

Question: How fast does the set of possible keys

shrink as the amount of ciphertext grows?

A Brief Introduction to
Information Theory
Some random events are more
unexpected than others
Some facts are more significant than
others
Shannon Entropy measures the amount
of uncertainty regarding a random
variable, or the amount of information an
event provides
Entropy Rate measures the growth of
information in an infinitely-long sequence

Definition of Entropy

If X is a random variable taking values

from finite alphabet X, then

(note: limx!0xlogx=0)

Entropy Rate

If L is a language formed of a sequence of

identically distributed (possibly dependent)
variables, then

The redundancy of a language is defined

as:

Basic Properties of Entropy

H(X)0, with equality iff X is constant
H(X)log2|X|, with equality iff p(x=X)=1/|X|

8 x2X

H(X,Y)H(X)+H(Y), with equality iff X

and Y are independently distributed
H(X|Y)H(X) , with equality iff X and Y
are independently distributed
Chain Rule:H(X,Y)=H(X|Y)+H(Y)

Entropy of Cryptosystem
Components
Reminder Cryptosystem = (P,K,C,E,D)
H(C|K) =H(P)
H(C|P,K)=H(P|C,K)=0
H(P,K)=H(P)+H(K)
H(C)H(P)
H(C,P,K)=H(C,K)=H(P,K)
H(K|C)=H(K)+H(P)-H(C)
H(K|Cn)=H(K)+H(Pn)-H(Cn)

Example: A strong cipher which is

very weak (1)

Everything Haley
says is encrypted
with a
monoalphabetic
substitution cipher
Could you break
it?
Q: Which 2
romantic era
authors had their
heroes break this
cipher?

(archive.org cache)

A strong cipher which is very weak (2)

Observation: There are 26!1026 possible
substitution ciphers over the lowercase
English alphabet
This is equivalent to 88-bit security so
why was it so easy to break?
Shannon: Any monoalphabetic cipher over
the English language is easily broken,
given a sequence of 25 letters of unknown
ciphertext

Unicity distance of a language (1)

By definition of the entropy rate:

Since |P|=|C|, we have:

Substituting into the formula for H(K|Cn):

Unicity distance of a language (2)

The cryptosystem is broken when

H(K|Cn)=0:

Plug in English (|P|=26, RL0.75) and the

substitution cipher (log2|K| 88) and we get

n025 (woops).

Tricks to raise the unicity distance

The idea raise the entropy of the
language without disturbing content
Adding random nulls hello becomes
h;e;;l;lo;;
Replace characters with homophonic sets
hello becomes hello
Compress the data

Good compression good for encryption

Good encryption bad for compression

Product Ciphers and

Combined Cryptosystems

Weighted Sum Cryptosystems

Different cryptosystems can be combined
to create a new cryptosystem.
Given two cryptosystems with the same
message space, consider a probabilistic
combination of the two systems: with
probability p use system A, otherwise use
system B.

Endomorphic cryptosystems and

product ciphers

Another way to use two cryptosystems is to

encrypt and decrypt messages consecutively. We
call this a product cipher.
An endomorphic cryptosystem is a system
where the message space is transformed to itself.
With such a system we can even create a product
of the system with itself.
The set of endomorphic cryptosystems with the
aforementioned operations almost create a linear
associative algebra.

Idempotent and commutative

cryptosystems
A cryptosystem S is called
idempotent if S2 = S.
Combining two idempotent secrecy
systems that commute will create
another idempotent secrecy system
isnt of any use.

Designing cryptosystems that are

hard to attack I
Shannon recognizes that aside of brute
force attacks, reasonable attacks attempt to
find keys according to their probability,
hopefully reducing the probability of many
of them near 0 without actually testing each
and every one.
To do this one needs to create statistics of
the ciphertext.

Designing cryptosystems that are

hard to attack II

Statistics must be:

Simple to measure
Depend more on the key (if were trying to
find the key) than the message
Useful divide the key-space into areas of
similar probability and eliminate most
Usable the separation of the key-space must
be natural

Confusion and Diffusion

To make finding such statistics harder (without an

ideal system) Shannon suggests:

Diffusion: Spreading the information in such a way

that it is hard to get exact results.
Confusion: Make the natural separation of the keyspace hard to use. (Make all parameters of key
dependant in natural decryption).

He believes that a combination of an initial

transposition with alternating substitutions and
linear operations may do the trick.

Closing Thoughts

Effect of this Paper

Paper did not bring forth an explosion similar to

the 1947 paper
The problem of good cipher design is essentially
one of finding difficult problems
This type of problem was made very public with
the creation of DES.
Both DES and AES use Shannons ideas of
combining confusion and diffusion (although
other ideas that he hadnt mentioned appear in
both).

Some closing thoughts

Cryptography is always in the context of

communication between agents.
Not only what messages are transmitted but from
whom to whom is important. We can hardly hide
the size of messages.
One can encrypt messages in ways that allow
breaking them, to misinform.
In huge information environments one could
easily(?) conceal the existence of messages and
the identities of the sender and the receiver.