Talk:Information-theoretic security

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Information-theoretic security

The title should be "Information-theoretic security" (note the hyphen). 71.142.221.191 22:42, 11 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

That depends on what sources you read. Nigel Smart uses "Information theoretic security" in his book Cryptography, An Introduction : Second Edition available online http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~nigel/Crypto_Book/ Bah23 12:15, 14 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with OP. "Information-theoretic" is a compound adjective in the English language and should therefore be hyphenated. 143.215.119.153 (talk) 22:58, 11 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I've moved the article. —Emufarmers^(T/C) 07:48, 6 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Quantum cryptography

"Quantum Cryptography" should be "Quantum Cryptanlysis" or "Cryptanalysis using a quantum computer" —Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.6.54.5 (talk) 15:10, 29 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Unproven assumptions

The sentence "An encryption protocol with information-theoretic security does not depend for its effectiveness on unproven assumptions about computational hardness." (emphasis mine) contradicts the last section on Unconditional Security. It should say "An encryption protocol with information-theoretic security does not depend on computational hardness for its effectiveness." — Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.97.124.14 (talk) 22:06, 7 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Physical layer encryption

This section is as clear as mud. It needs, as a minimum, some examples of how it might work. A few paragraphs in, there's a paragraph that talks about phased arrays. It seems to suggest that a channel is secure, when there's no physical way to intercept it; e.g. when there is a directional radio signal, then no-one who is off-axis can receive it. Is this a correct example of "physical security"? Seems odd to me. I could "securely" communicate with someone by shining a laser at them; but this is secure as long as there is no dust in the air to scatter the light. Is this a valid example? What is this section actually talking about, anyway???

More generally, what does "physical layer encryption" have to do with "information-theoretic security"? It seems to be an entirely unrelated concept jammed into this article, having nothing to do with anything. 84.15.178.66 (talk) 13:09, 27 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Perfect security, unconditional security

There were paragraphs, removed in 2021 by CptOblivious, that distinguished "perfect security" and "information-theoretic security". The removed text described Shannon's definition of information-theoretic security as the mutual information (MI) between the plaintext and the ciphertext, and how the MI needed to be less than the number of bits in the plain-text message. The stated reason for the removal was that the text was wrong. I could not see what was wrong; worse, the removal of these paragraphs muddles the entire article, as its now quite unclear how all these different kinds of security differ from each other, and which ones are subsets of which. Is "perfect security" the same thing as "unconditional security", or are these two different things? What is the relation of either of these to "information theoretic security", which seems to be something else, again? 84.15.178.66 (talk) 13:26, 27 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

ZOSCII

ZOSCII currently provides practical Information Theoretic Security. It has similarties to a book cipher (misnomer) using non-deterministic address indirection to a good entropy LUT (which is used for authorisation) - mathematically provable. No encrytion, open sourced for everyone to verify. Is it worth putting ZOSCII and any other such absolute security methods here?

https://zoscii.com/files/proofs.md ~2026-67188 (talk) 16:35, 6 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]