cryptography [English]

InterPARES Definition

No definition in earlier IP projects. ITrust definition not yet developed.

Other Definitions

  • Diffie & Landau 2007 (†848 p.13): a transformation of a message that makes the message incomprehensible to anyone who is not in possession of secret information that is needed to restore the message to its normal plaintext or cleartext form.

Citations

  • de Leeuw et al. (eds) 2007 (†850 p.567): The basic idea in cryptography is to apply a complex transformation to the information to be protected. (†2379)
  • DuPont 2016 (†854 p.294): Cryptography is a complex phenomenon that shifts in composition and use across history, but is essentially notational symbols that are activated through encryption, to produce ciphertext. Usually (but not always), cryptography refers to a process of establishing and maintaining secrecy (†2382)
  • Kahn 1967 (†849 n.p.): cryptography, on the other hand, do not conceal the presence of a secret message but render it unintelligible to outsiders by various transformations of the plaintext. (†2378)
  • Shannon 1945 (†851 p.657): A secrecy system is defined abstractly as a set of transformations of one space (the set of possible messages) into a second space (the set of possible cryptograms). Each particular transformation of the set corresponds to enciphering with a particular key. The transformations are supposed reversible (non-singular) so that unique deciphering is possible when the key is known. (†2381)