The Digital Big Bang

6CRYPTOGRAPHY

“Agile cryptography is an imperative now—not in a decade or two.”

Taher Elgamal, Salesforce

“Even an error that leaks a small amount of information can be exploited by an attacker and result in a complete break.”

Dan Boneh, Stanford

Cryptography harnesses the most fundamental principles of mathematics to secure data. Cryptography is astoundingly strong, almost mystical, and enduring—its first use was recorded in ancient Greece.

Cryptography is the layer of protection that safeguards segmentation and plays a key role in allowing or denying access. It also plays a role in keeping information private, in detecting changes to information (integrity), and creating confidence in the identity of a person or process (authentication).

Viewed by many as arcane technology, cryptography is a powerful way of encoding information. All the computers on Earth today would have to spend longer than the age of the universe to brute-force a single correctly encrypted Triple-DES encrypted message.

But as quantum computing gets closer to becoming an operational reality, the protective power of important applications of cryptography will be lost. And if cryptography fails, so too will segmentation and access control.

Strong encryption, correctly implemented, is one of the rare silver bullets available to the security community.

Cryptography is based on certain mathematical properties ...