Chapter 7: The Strength of the Cryptosystem

• The algorithm, the secrecy of the key, the length of the key, the initialization vectors, and how they all work together within the cryptosystem provides the strength of an encryption method.
• Strength is how hard it is to figure out the algorithm or key and the goal on designing an encryption method is to make compromising it too expensive or time-consuming.
• Work factor is another name for cryptography strength and it estimates the effort and resources it would take an attacker to penetrate a cryptosystem.
• Important element of encryption are to use an algorithm without flaws, use a large key size, use all possible values within the keyspace, and protect the key and if one element is weak, it can be the causing factor for the process to fail.