Network Security: Private Communications in a Public World, 3rd Edition

16Cryptographic Tricks

We’ve covered the major cryptographic building blocks, such as secret key encryption and integrity checks, public key encryption and signatures, and hashes/message digests. In this chapter we’ll talk about some other functions. We won’t go into great detail about the math, or proofs, but we will at least demystify what these functions are attempting to do, give some intuition about how they accomplish it, and give examples of those that are used in actual real-world protocols.

16.1 Secret Sharing

Secret sharing is a way for someone, say, Alice, to store a piece of information, say, S, that must be kept secret from all except Alice but must also be retrievable by Alice. There is a tradeoff between robustly storing S so ...