information-theoretic security in our ever challenging cyberlandscape.

As you can imagine, security in a digital world, is one of the major priorities, susceptible to grab all our attention in real-time. The stakes are strategic and huge. 

We come from modern cryptographic schemes that rely on computational complexity for their security. 

Henceforth, we can talk about another notion of security: information-theoretic security; meaning that, even with limitless computational power, attackers could extract no useful information from an encrypted message. 

Thanks to researchers at MIT and Maynooth University in Ireland who have showed how to calculate the minimum-security guarantees for any given encryption scheme, which could enable information managers to make more informed decisions about how to protect data.

 “By investigating these limits and characterizing them, you can gain quite a bit of insight about the performance of these schemes and how you can leverage tools from other fields, like coding theory and so forth, for designing and understanding security systems,” said Flavio du Pin Calmon, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science and first author on all three Allerton papers. His advisor, Muriel Médard, the Cecil E. Green Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, is also on all three papers; they’re joined by colleagues including Ken Duffy of Maynooth and Mayank Varia of MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory.