Prof. Dr. Nikolay Andreevich Moldovyan is an honored inventor of Russian Federation (2002), a Chief Researcher of Laboratory of Information Systems Security at St. Petersburg Institute for Informatics and Automation of Russian Academy of Sciences, and a Professor with the St. Petersburg State Electrotechnical University “LETI”. His research interests include computer security and cryptography, Digital signature algorithms, Information authentication protocols, Real-time information protection technology, Fast software and hardware encryption algorithms, Pseudo-probabilistic encryption, Quantum Cryptography. He has authored or co-authored more than 90 inventions and 300 scientific articles, books, and reports. He received his Ph.D. from the Academy of Sciences of Moldova (1981) and the degree of Doctor of technical sciences from High Examination Board of Russian Federation, Moscow (2001). He is supervisor of near 20 Ph.D. students including two Vietnamese.
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Moldovyan N.A.
Russia, St. Petersburg, St. Petersburg Institute for Informatics and Automation of Russian Academy of Sciences
INFORMATICS AND CRYPTOGRAPHY: MUTUAL INFLUENCE
Cryptographic algorithms and protocols are widely used to provide information security (IS) of modern information and telecommunication systems. The history of the development of modern cryptography as a scientific and applied field is closely connected with the development of informatics. Information technology (IT) served as a source for the development of cryptography, the development of its new directions, the improvement of cryptographic algorithms and protocols. Items of the IS - ensuring confidentiality, authenticity and accessibility of information - have always played a prominent role in the used IT. In ancient times, the need to preserve secrets prompted mankind to invent cryptography as a method to write messages in the form of text that can be read only using a secret key. In the era of the emergence of modern IT, based on the massive use of computer technology, the emerging challenges of mass distribution of secret keys and the legalization of electronic documents and messages were the source of public-key cryptography, which marked a revolution in cryptography and the source of new IT.
The development of informatics, including the improvement of computer facilities and telecommunications, stimulated the development of cryptographic methods of protecting information both in quantitative terms to increase the size of the used keys and in qualitative terms to develop cryptographic protocols of new types. On the one hand, the sharp increase in computing performance of the used computers required the use of cryptographic algorithms and protocols with higher security, and on the other hand, the availability of productive computing technology opened up new opportunities associated with the use of cryptographic algorithms and protocols requiring the use of distributed computing, high-performance computing and the large amount of used memory. Thanks to the development of modern public-key cryptography, the theory of numbers has turned into one of the areas of mathematics that are in demand in practice. At the same time, cryptography itself was formed as one of the branches of modern applied mathematics.
The mutual influence of cryptography and informatics is traced in the formation of the following cryptography areas: formal security proof of the public-key cryptosystems, threshold secret sharing protocols, digital signature algorithms, multi-signature protocols, elliptic-curve cryptography, deniable encryption, homomorphic encryption, pseudo-probability encryption, quantum key distribution, quantum transmission information, post-quantum cryptography. Development of the fast-encryption methods suitable for efficient hardware and software implementation had led to the justification of the expediency of introducing a novel instruction, universal controlled bit permutation instruction, in universal massively accessible microprocessors. Such instruction solves both the problem of increasing the speed of program ciphers and the problem of significantly increasing the performance of the software implementations of algorithms using bit permutations of arbitrary types.
As examples there are considered algorithms and protocols for pseudo-probabilistic encryption, an approach to the construction of post-quantum cryptosystems, the architecture of the universal controlled bit permutation instruction, approaches to increasing the security of the public key cryptoschemes, the problem of extending the functionality of digital signature standards and the problem of providing a given level of the cryptographic transformation in the case of using short shared keys (16 to 40 bits).