Cryptography and its analysis

Horia Corcalciuc

The seminar is a practical discussion about various ciphers and the cryptanalysis used to compromise their security based on a published cryptography  suite (developed by Corcalciuc V. Horia). The program sums up old and new ciphers bringing some personal contributions to the OpenSource world. The program is written in the C language and aims to work as a text manipulation filter benefiting from pipes such as those under a *nix environment or more recent win32 operating systems.

The emphasis is on topics related to cryptography including the necessary cryptanalysis of historical ciphers as well as recent methods. The different ciphers (some of which, such as PURPLE represent collaborative work) will be compared based on common cryptographic terms such as SAC, diffusion, confusion etc...

Topics to be covered include:
Ï	Categories and definitions of widely used terms.
Ï	Initial ciphers and their strengths and weaknesses.
Ï	ENIGMA vs. PURPLE
Ï	The unbreakable cipher.
Ï	Feistel Networks.
Ï	Frequency analysis and the index of coincidence.
Ï	Improved Hill-Climbing techniques.
Ï	Protocols.
Ï	Sources.

The goal of the seminar is to point out the origins of ciphers as well as discuss their strength and weaknesses. Various historical facts will also be mentioned in order to highlight the context in which certain ciphers proved to be resistant.