Re: Best definition of cryptography

From: Roger Schlafly (rogersc1_at_mindspring.com)
Date: 04/29/04 

Date: Thu, 29 Apr 2004 12:52:13 -0700

"Anton Stiglic" <stiglic@cs.mcgill.ca> wrote
> > >"The science of providing secure communication over insecure
> > > channels".
> > That's seems like a nice definition to me. Rivest has also proposed a
> > wording something like "the science of communication in the presence of
> > an adversary", which I also like.
> That's a nice one. It can nicely include stuff like zero-knowledge
proofs,
> where
> your channel might be secure, but where one of the participants ...

I think that the definition should not imply that communication is
a subset of cryptography. Usually cryptography takes some
communcations channel as a given, and then tries to make some
more secure use of it.