General and Mathematical Attacks in Cryptography

This chapter introduces several techniques, mathematical and otherwise, developed for the breaking of modern ciphers and other components of crypto‐systems used in real‐life applications and protocols. In cryptanalysis, various existing probable pieces of information are pieced together in order to determine the secret key or the message. The chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the most common attacks on privacy, namely brute‐force attack, man‐in‐the‐middle attacks, relay attacks, known plain text attacks, known cipher text attacks, chosen plain text attacks, replay attacks, birthday attacks, attacks on the Rivest–Shamir–Adleman algorithm, timing attack, and cold boot attacks. Differential cryptanalysis works in a similar way to the chosen plain text attack. The attack consists of looking at differences produced in the cipher text by known differences in the plain text. An attacker’s ability to preprocess information has to be taken into account when analyzing the security of any cryptographic protocol.