The Role of Information Theory in Cryptography

Ueli Maurer

Cryptography and Coding '93, The Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, Southend-on-Sea, England, pp. 49–71, Dec 1993.

This paper reviews the relations between information theory and cryptography, from Shannon's foundation of information theory to the most recent developments in unconditionally-secure key-agreement protocols. For a long time, information theory has mainly been used in cryptography to prove lower bounds on the size of the secret key required to achieve a certain level of security in secrecy and authentication systems. More recent results on a slightly extended model suggest that perfect secrecy is practically possible with only a short secret key, thus apparently contradicting Shannon's lower bound on the key size of a perfect cipher.

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{Maurer93,
    author       = {Ueli Maurer},
    title        = {The Role of Information Theory in Cryptography},
    editor       = {P. Farrell},
    booktitle    = {Cryptography and Coding~'93},
    pages        = 49--71,
    year         = 1993,
    month        = 12,
    publisher    = {The Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, Southend-on-Sea, England},
}