Wednesday, September 7, 2016

Acronym list for cryptography.

I have an issue with acronyms, and simple descriptions. Everyone is correct in all statements but you need to understand their assumption set. I have found that cryptographers are particularly fond of acronyms, to the point that I am unsure if they know what they are talking about. You get sentences such as "CBC requires an unpredictable IV".
Acronym Meaning Example
IV Initialization Vector You often see this in relashionship to one-way hash functions.
ECB Electronic Code Book For block ciphers, when a stream is divided into blocks and each block is encrypted separately.
CBC Cipher Block Chaining Like ECB for block ciphers, but each block is XOR'd with the previous block before encryption.
CTR Counter Counter Mode turns a block cipher into a stream cipher by adding a counter to the blocks in a stream sequence.
AEAD Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data Block cipher mode (based on CTR) that creates an output and an authentication tag.
SIV Synthetic Initialization Vector A vector based on a dependency sequence, the best description is this paper.
ARX Logic Design A structure of cipher based on Additions (a ∧ b), Rotations (a >> i), and XORx (a ⊕ b).
I will add more to this list as I get frustrated with them.

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