Confusion and diffusion
Confusión y difusión
- Date
- 1945 · confidence high
- Place
- Murray Hill, New Jersey, United States
- Credited to
- Claude Shannon
- Field
- Communication
What was discovered
Two properties of a secure cipher identified by Claude Shannon: confusion, which obscures the relationship between plaintext and ciphertext by varying how the key is applied, and diffusion, which spreads the plaintext's statistical regularities across the ciphertext.
What it led to
- Design of modern block ciphers (DES, AES)
- Theoretical foundation of modern symmetric cryptography
- Systematic resistance to statistical cryptanalysis