Abstract
Not since the early work of [DH], [RSA], and [GM] has there been a great deal of work on the basic definition of “normal” cryptography, and on what it means for a cryptosystem to be secure. By normal cryptogaphy, I mean not protocols to accomplish sophisticated goals, but merely the situation where party A wishes to send a message to party B over a line which is being tapped. Existing definitions of such a system, when they aren’t too vague, are overly restrictive; existing definitions of security of such systems, when given rigorously, are usually overly liberal. In this paper I’ll present what seem to me to be the proper definitions, give statements of the basic theorems I know about these definitions, and raise some very fundamental open questions. Most of the definitions and results appeared in [R].
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
C. H. Bennett, G. Brassard, J. Robert, “Privacy amplification by public discussion”, SIAM J. on Comput., 17, 1988, 210–229.
W. Diffie, M. E. Hellman, “New directions in cryptography”, IEEE Trans. Informat. Theory, IT-22, 1976, 644–654.
O. Goldreich, S. Goldwasser, S. Micali, “How to construct random functions”, JACM, 33, 1986, 792–807.
S. Goldwasser, S. Micali, “Probabilistic encryption”, J. Comput. System Sci., 28, 1984, 270–299.
S. Goldwasser, S. Micali, R. Rivest, “A digital signature scheme secure against adaptive chosen-message attacks”, SIAM J. on Comput., 17, 1988, 281–308.
S. Goldwasser, S. Micali, P. Tong, “Why and how to establish a private code on a public network”, Proc. 23 IEEE Symp. on Foundations of Computer Science, 1982, 134–144.
S. Micali, C. Rackoff, B Sloan, “The notion of security for probabilistic cryptosystems”, SIAM J. on Comput., 17, 1988, 412–426.
C. Rackoff, Class notes on Cryptography, 1985.
[RSA]R. Rivest, A. Shamir, L. Adleman, “A method for obtaining digital signatures and public-key cryptosystems”, Comm. ACM, 21, 1978, 120–126.
C. E. Shannon, “Communication theory of secrecy systems”, Bell Syst. Tech. J., vol.28, 1949, 656–715.
M. Sipser, “A complexity theoretic approach to randomness”, Proc. 15 ACM Symp. on Theory of Computing, 1983, 330–335.
L. Stockmeyer, “On approximation algorithms for #P”, SIAM J. on Comput., 14, 1985.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1990 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Rackoff, C. (1990). A Basic Theory of Public and Private Cryptosystems. In: Goldwasser, S. (eds) Advances in Cryptology — CRYPTO’ 88. CRYPTO 1988. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 403. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-34799-2_19
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-34799-2_19
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-0-387-97196-4
Online ISBN: 978-0-387-34799-8
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive