Operating Systems: Concurrent and Distributed Software Design

8.3. Approaches to encryption

Encryption has been used for millennia. For an entertaining description, see Singh (1999) which starts with stories of techniques used in military campaigns in classical history and progresses through to computerized methods. Our concern here is encryption for distributed systems and this chapter gives an introduction to basic components which together are used to build secure systems. Schneier (1996) is an encyclopaedic reference on the subject and should be consulted for expansion and further references.

Definitions

A message originates in plaintext or cleartext. The process of encoding it to make it unreadable in transit is called encryption and the process of transforming it back into the original message is ...