Reviews for Foundations of cryptology

The average rating for Foundations of cryptology based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-01-05 00:00:00 Bernie Marlow If you disregard computational complexity, the problem of cryptography is trivial: a key longer than the plaintext is safe, the plainext should be XORed with the key to obtain the ciphertext, which should be XORed with the key to reveal the plaintext, and a key shorter than the plaintext is unsafe because all such keys can be enumerated, and only a small fraction would reveal meaningful plaintext. However, in the real world you cannot enumerate all the keys even 128 bits long. Suppose there was a way to stretch short keys into exponentially longer bit strings, which would be indistinguishable from random strings by any effective distinguisher? This book is about such problems: if you have a function that is hard to invert on 1% of 1000-bit strings, how can you use it to build a function that is hard to invert on 99% of 5000-bit strings?

Review # 2 was written on 2016-12-15 00:00:00 Morgan Doyne Much of the foundational work in cryptography was done by Goldwasser, Micali (co-recipients of the Turing Award), Yao and Goldreich. This is a pretty good introduction to some of the key results and definitions. The definitions or variations thereof are shared across the breadth of the subject for the most part.