MIT News: Encryption Is Less Secure Than We Thought

The problem, Médard explains, is that information-theoretic analyses of secure systems have generally used the wrong notion of entropy. They relied on so-called Shannon entropy, named after the founder of information theory, Claude Shannon, who taught at MIT from 1956 to 1978. Shannon entropy is based on the average probability that a given string of bits will occur in a particular type of digital file. In a general-purpose communications system, that's the right type of entropy to use, because the characteristics of the data traffic will quickly converge to the statistical averages.



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