VietMX Staff asked 3 years ago
- Confusion means that each binary digit (bit) of the ciphertext should depend on several parts of the key, obscuring the connections between the two. The property of confusion hides the relationship between the ciphertext and the key. This property makes it difficult to find the key from the ciphertext and if a single bit in a key is changed, the calculation of the values of most or all of the bits in the ciphertext will be affected. Confusion increases the ambiguity of ciphertext and it is used by both block and stream ciphers.
- Diffusion means that if we change a single bit of the plaintext, then (statistically) half of the bits in the ciphertext should change, and similarly, if we change one bit of the ciphertext, then approximately one half of the plaintext bits should change.2 Since a bit can have only two states, when they are all re-evaluated and changed from one seemingly random position to another, half of the bits will have changed state. The idea of diffusion is to hide the relationship between the ciphertext and the plain text. This will make it hard for an attacker who tries to find out the plain text and it increases the redundancy of plain text by spreading it across the rows and columns; it is achieved through transposition of algorithm and it is used by block ciphers only.
These two properties help to ensure that extracting the key from plaintext-ciphertext pairs is difficult or infeasible.
